If you haven’t yet heard of Maria Popova’s wonderful website Brain Pickings—but why wouldn’t you have? You’re a reader, a writer, you’re interested in a lot of different things, like me—you should run right over and check it out. I’ll wait.
Honestly, I don’t know how Popova does it. She consumes twelve to fifteen books a week (you do the math), tweets every fifteen minutes (to 291,736 followers), and blogs three times a day at Brain Pickings (which, as the site tells us, “remains ad-free and takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit”). She has bylines at Wired UK, the Atlantic, Huffington Post, and probably some I’ve missed; she’s an MIT Fellow and speaks to MBA students at major universities. Popova has been written about in the New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes, the Guardian, Mother Jones … and who knows where else. It exhausts me just thinking about it.
All this and yet I’ve never gotten a sense of her writing or reading having been rushed. The opposite, in fact: her posts are insightful, thoughtful, fascinating. They are little snippets of information I’m interested in. And here’s one you may be interested in: “9 Books on Reading and Writing.”
I’ve only read a couple of these nine: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing. (I’ve read others.) I’ve owned and still own a multitude of copies of The Elements of Style (I lend them or give them and find myself buying another) but I think this illustrated version is one I might like to have. The rest I’ll definitely have a look at it. Have you read any on this list?
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6 Comments
Oooh, thank you! HAVEN’T seen this, but I promptly subscribed and bookmarked the writing books post for my wish list. :)
She’s incredible. :)
We used Elements of Style in high school freshman English. I didn’t really care for On Writing – and honestly, I can’t state exactly why; it, as we say here in the south, didn’t sit right with me somehow. It’s not on her list, and it’s definitely British, but have you read Eats, Shoots and Leaves? :)
I have, indeed. :)
I find that reading winning works helps with putting phrases together. Especially The Best of American Short Stories series, each year the editors seem to pick the stories that touch on hearts and minds.
It’s the first thing I tell people who want to write: you really can’t expect to be a writer without also being a reader. :)