Here are 100 books that Meander, Spiral, Explode fans have personally recommended if you like
Meander, Spiral, Explode.
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I stumbled upon Hickey’s memoirs and while reading them became captivated not only by the frequently hilarious episodes he recounts from his life, but also by the subject of autobiography and how narrating our life story somehow projects a sense of self and identity to the reader. Trying to grasp this process led me to exploring a wide range of books, and opened up understanding of how our selves are fashioned and what they mean to others. An endlessly fascinating subject.
With an easy-going and very approachable style, Eakin explores how our identity is formed by the autobiographical stories we tell about ourselves. He wears his deeply informed theoretical insights very lightly, and when I encountered this book while working on my book on Hickey, I came away with an appreciation of the importance of narrative in determining who we are, who we think we are, and who we want others to think we are.
Autobiography is naturally regarded as an art of retrospect, but making autobiography is equally part of the fabric of our ongoing experience. We tell the stories of our lives piecemeal, and these stories are not merely about our selves but also an integral part of them. In this way we "live autobiographically"; we have narrative identities. In this book, noted life-writing scholar Paul John Eakin explores the intimate, dynamic connection between our selves and our stories, between narrative and identity in everyday life.
Eakin draws on a wide range of autobiographical writings, from work by Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, and…
I grew up in the Scottish countryside, reading passionately. When adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer came from my latest book: a nun, an outlaw, a queen, or an explorer. Not until I was in my twenties did I realise that I wanted to be the person behind the covers of a book, not between them. My early stories, written between waitressing shifts, were bafflingly bad. Gradually I began to understand that the fiction I loved was driven by a hidden machinery. I now teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and have been lucky enough to explore this idea with many talented students.
Le Guin is a star in fiction’s firmament but in this book she’s also a wonderfully modest practitioner of the art of writing. She discusses the sound of your prose, naming characters, repetition, and point of view. I found her chapter on crowding and leaping especially helpful. Crowding is when you follow Keats’ advice to load every rift with ore; leaping is when you skillfully leave things out—two invaluable skills in fiction, and in life.
From the celebrated Ursula K. Le Guin, "a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller" (Boston Globe), the revised and updated edition of her classic guide to the essentials of a writer's craft.
Completely revised and rewritten to address modern challenges and opportunities, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing.
Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guin’s own witty commentary and…
We approached our book, theme, and recommendations as readers and lovers of Melville’s work who were inspired by following in his footsteps to places “whole oceans away,” as he describes the Pacific in Moby-Dick. Melville traveled widely and kept up his travels throughout a lifetime of further exploration, as well as voluminous writing. We want to share the exhilaration of traveling witha writer: that is, by reading of Melville’s travels, traveling to the places he visited, and also hearing from people who know those places too. We hope our book gives readers contact with the many dimensions of global travel, in whatever form they find for themselves.
One might read Melville’s accounts of the Pacific and reckon with only literary sources and contexts for his books. Bercaw Edwards lays bare the sounds of Pacific voices, the oral sources for his work. Drawing on a wealth of popular accounts as well as theories of discourse and linguistics, she identifies three “languages” Melville learned in his Pacific travels: sailor talk, (a rich world of yarns, folklore, and tall tales), “cannibal” talk (both islanders’ stories and the narratives they inspired), and missionary talk (accounts by religious leaders in the islands). Bercaw Edwards brings deep appreciation and unforgettable zest to Melville’s work, showing his remarkable ear and memory for rich varieties of speech and what they convey about cultural encounters.
This book offers an examination of Melville's 'borrowing'.At the age of twenty-one, Herman Melville signed on the whaleship Acushnet as a common seaman and sailed from Massachusetts to the South Pacific. Upon reaching Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and spent a month ashore on this reputed 'cannibal island.' He departed as crew of another whaleship but was put ashore in the heavily missionized Tahitian islands after participating in a bloodless mutiny. Eventually making his way to Hawaii, he joined the crew of the American frigate United States and finally reached Boston in October 1844 after four years…
How might we live and write otherwise? I am preoccupied by this question, and am fairly certain that at minimum we have to start by imagining it. As a culture worker and writer I hope my projects and experiments do just this. There is so much to reinvent, and so much that interconnects us. I am inspired by the ways the authors of these books take on their times and passions, and tell stories in ways I find unexpected. Their abilities to integrate divergent avenues of thought, deep research, and truly weird characters and circumstances has lit my imagination and I hope it does yours as well!
All of Solnit’s writings have been an inspiration but this book’s oscillations between the intimacy of her relationship with her dying mother, the poignant degradation of apricots, and the many little-known and fascinating histories that she miraculously weaves into a truly magical book. Solnit has a way of offering hope in the darkness of some of life’s most challenging times, by swinging from details of her own life to those of others she knows or has studied. It’s a remarkable read as it takes you along on the nimble journey of her mind and heart.
From the author of Orwell's Roses, a personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy-a fitting companion to Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
In this exquisitely written book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories-of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness-Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other…
I’ve always been fascinated by monsters. Growing up I saw television shows and read books about famous ones like Bigfoot and Nessie, and always wanted to search for them and discover the truth. That led me to a degree in psychology to learn about human cognition and perception, and a career in folklore to understand how legends and rumors spread. But I also wanted field experience, and spent time at Loch Ness, in Canadian woods said to house Sasquatch, to the Amazon, Sahara, and the jungles of Central America looking for the chupacabra. Along the way became an author, writing books including Tracking the Chupacabra, Lake Monster Mysteries, Big—If True, and Investigating Ghosts.
There are many terrifying monsters, but few were as feared as the beast of Gévaudan, which terrorized the French countryside in the 1760s.
Said to be, variously, a werewolf, a dog-hybrid, a hyena, or some unknown beast, it was blamed for killing many dozens of villagers. The French government sent top hunters to kill the beast, and conspiracy theories ran rampant. I recommend Monsters of the Gevaudan because I love the way it blends history, folklore, and investigation into a compelling mystery.
Don’t believe the mystery-mongering TV shows offering wild theories: the truth is in this book—and it’s stranger than fiction.
In a brilliant, original rendition, Monsters of the Gevaudan revisits a spellbinding French tale that has captivated imaginations for over two hundred years, and offers the definitive explanation of the strange events that underlie this timeless story.
In 1764 a peasant girl was killed and partially eaten while tending a flock of sheep. Eventually, over a hundred victims fell prey to a mysterious creature, or creatures, whose cunning and deadly efficiency terrorized the region and mesmerized Europe. The fearsome aggressor quickly took on mythic status, and the beast of the Gevaudan passed into French folklore.
After spending years as a freelance writer and content marketer, I turned my attention to exploring the inner workings of why writing works and how it fails. I’m an unabashed nonfiction geek on a mission to help people make a positive impact with their words—whether they’re writing emails, blog posts, or nonfiction books.
Erin Lebacqz is an experienced business writing teacher, and her practical and practiced bent shows in this book. It offers solid advice for clear and effective writing, covering topics like word choice, sentence structure, and more. The numerous examples will serve people new on the job as well as those who simply want to sharpen their skills and tighten their prose.
Even as someone who writes about writing, I found fresh approaches and ideas in this book. For example, Lebacqz suggests that as writers, we should act like “hosts” for our readers. I love that.
Write to both inform and connect, and use intentional word choice to avoid misunderstandings and build strong relationships. Get confident about your business writing, emailing, posting on socials, and all the other ways you connect with the people you know through writing.
Down-to-earth, conversational, and brief, High-Value Writing: Real Strategies for Real-World Writing helps you manage the writing challenges you face at work and elsewhere in life. The book provides strategies, tips and tricks, examples, revision examples, and lots of practical advice you can apply in your writing this week.
Learn to make writing choices you feel good about; and…
I write the NYPD Detective Chiara Corelli Mystery series featuring Corelli and her partner Detective P.J. Parker. Most mysteries have a single main character so I’m passionate about finding other authors who write mysteries with two professional investigators as main characters. It’s fascinating to see how authors writing the same type of characters handle them and what they do about character growth over the course of the series. To me, watching two characters react to each other, seeing their relationship change over the course of a book or a series is much more interesting than reading about a single detective.
When I sat down to write my first novel I knew I wanted to model my characters on George’s Lynley and Havers but I couldn’t even start writing because I had no idea how to structure a novel, particularly a mystery. As fate would have it, George released her book on writing, Write Away, around that time. In it, she described her process with examples from her own books and it was exactly what I needed. This book provided the essential tools I needed to write.
Elizabeth George is one of the most successful writers of crime fiction in the world. Her twelve novels have appeared on bestseller lists in the UK, USA and Australia, and several of them have been dramatised by BBC Television as the Inspector Lynley Mysteries. She has also written a collection of short stories and edited a crime anthology.
Now she shares this wealth of experience with would-be novelists, and with crime fiction fans. Drawing extensively on her own work, and that of other bestselling writers including Stephen King, Harper Lee, Dennis Lehane and many others, she illustrates her points about…
My introduction to mystery writing was a competition for a first crime novel. I was lucky enough to win with Wobble to Death, about a Victorian long-distance race. When I went to collect the prize, I was startled to be asked if I was already at work on the next one. The publishers Macmillan had started a crime list and were looking for a career writer. I knew practically nothing about the genre and had to give myself a crash course. How I needed the support of books like these! After five years, I had the confidence to give up the day job and have made my living from mystery writing for almost fifty years.
Although I’m a Brit, I joined the Mystery Writers of America early in my career and benefited enormously from the friendships I made. This newly published volume is a virtual encyclopedia of the advice their experts are willing to share. With more than seventy contributors, it covers the field and more, including mysteries for children, graphic novels, and true crime. None of it is treated as gospel. I laughed out loud when I found the chapter "Always Outline" by Jeffery Deaver, followed by "Never Outline" by Lee Child. Even the follow-up process of reaching out to readers is explained in "Building Your Community" by Louise Penny. This is a must-visit workshop for anyone serious about the craft.
From the most successful mystery writers in the business, an invaluable guide to crafting mysteries-from character development and plot to procedurals and thrillers-a must-have for every aspiring mystery writer.
Mystery Writers of America (MWA) is known for providing unparalleled resources on the craft, art, and business of storytelling, helping writers of all levels improve their skills for nearly a century. Now, this new handbook helps authors navigate the ever-shifting publishing landscape-from pacing, plotting, the business side of publishing, to the current demand for diversity and inclusivity across all genres, and more.
Featuring essays by a new generation of bestselling experts…
I’m a criminologist who is increasingly at least as interested in social order as I am in crime. In part I think this can be expressed as a concern with what glues us together rather than what pulls us apart. What particularly makes me smile, and draws me in, is the ability that some writers and researchers have to find the fascinating and the remarkable in the everyday. Whether it be what we wear, how we speak, or when we sleep, there is just as much to learn about our contemporary society from such matters as there is from who’s in parliament or how our financial institutions are behaving.
I first came across Georges Perec via his novels. Many (most) of these are experimental – a word that often puts me off – but their cleverness is additional to great writing and storytelling. One of his novels, for example – La Disparition (A Void) – is written entirely without the letter ‘e’ as, remarkably, is the English translation! Species of Spacesis a collection of non-fiction essays in which he encourages us to look, to observe what is around us, to become anthropologists of the everyday. What might we find? Yes, we lie on beds. But, as Perec observes, this is highly unusual as they’re one of the very few places where we adopt a horizontal posture, and the only general one (the others are things like operating tables, beaches, psychiatrists’ couches. Perec focuses on what he calls the ‘infra-ordinary’ (as opposed to extraordinary) and offers something remarkable on…
Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.
I am passionate about this book list because it helped me get where I am today, a multiple-times bestselling author and an award-winning senior reporter. I began working as an overnight police round reporter before moving into sports, where I became one of Australia's best news-breaking rugby league journalists. I was then appointed News Corp Australia's Chief National Motorsports Writer and traveled the world chasing Formula 1 story, as well as covering Australia's V8 Supercar races. Everyone has to start somewhere, and for me, this list of books helped me begin and continue to grow to reach the level of success that I have.
This one didn’t change my life, but it did provide me with a no-nonsense guide to pesky things like conjunctions and clauses, superlatives and synonyms, prepositions and pronouns, and, obviously, alliteration. Ha.
What I liked most about this book is that it isn’t written like a textbook. I read what is widely considered to be the writer's bible, The Elements of Style by William Struck and E.B. White, and considered giving up on my dream of becoming a writer because the book made me feel as if only someone with an Einstein-like intellect could write.
But, as Mr. King wrote, the story is what matters; everything else is just dressing. But in saying that, being able to string together sentences helps (I think my jokes are funny, but no one else does), and this book gives a simple explanation of how to make your copy sing.
On Writing Well has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It is a book for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does in the age of e-mail and the Internet.
Whether you want to write about people or places, science and technology, business, sports, the arts or about yourself in the increasingly popular memoir genre, On Writing Well offers you fundamental priciples as well as the insights of a distinguished writer and teacher. With more…
