Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Below is English singer-songwriterTracey Thorns list.
The actual faraway tree was a tall oak at the end of our garden.
I truly believed that.
Honestly, I could choose anything by Orwell.
I read him as a teen and loved him.
That advice of his about good prose being like a window pane?
I always have that in the back of my mind.
It jibes with how I instinctively feel about writing.
I read this at the same time as I discovered her music.
It made me realize where songs like Strange Fruit had come from.
The rawness of those songs had their roots in a devastating history of life experience.
Another one I read as a teen.
I havent read it since, and part of me thinks now it might be awful.
But I will stay true, and state for the record how much I loved it at 19.
I immediately saw what I had missed at the time, and this book continued my feminist education.
I always imagine he must have been brilliant company.
This was the first book I read and properly analyzed at university.
It struck me as the first book Id read that got inside peoples heads.
Id thought it was just me.
Its not so easy now to admit to liking Larkin.
Yet still the poems are full of insight and empathy.
They catalogue the endless little failures of life, all the compromises, all the missteps.
This speaks very directly to the person I am right now.
Observations from a woman in middle age on marriage, divorce, freedom, and countless other things.
She notices everything and records it in an unconventional way.
And for anyone writing nonfiction, its a master class in how to do it.
Related
Tags:
