Ann Marie Gamble

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Archive for the ‘Reading’ Category

Road Trip Reading

Friday, June 13th, 2014

We’re getting ready to spend three weeks up north, and I’m trying to decide what to pack, bookwise. The mp3 player is crammed full of audiobooks for the drive, thirteen hours on a well-known route so no wasting time with maps. The destination has a good library, so I ought to be able to relax about any decision I come to. I’m already daydreaming about the beach chair, the Adirondack lounger, the swing in the woods for the print reading once we arrive. But what to bring, what to bring! Do IWoman

  1. Take those couple of titles I’ve been slogging through–at last here’s some distraction-free time to knock them off.
  2. Take only what fits in my suitcase, except that
  3. We’re going by car, so I can take more than one suitcase.
  4. And what about my e-reader?
  5. (adds “e-reader charger” to packing checklist)

(more…)

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Posted in Reading, Travel | No Comments »

Moonlight

Friday, September 28th, 2012

What is it about little kids and the moon? We’ve always lived in town—where there were plenty of other lights—and their personalities are quite different, but at a certain age, they each were the first to spot the moon when we went out at night. On Twitter and Facebook, it’s the parents of toddlers who are posting things about the moon’s phases. When I was a child, I called the moon the cookie, and my father the linguistics professor used that anecdote to open a paper about metaphor.

Now that my kids are teens, they aren’t as impressed. We drug ourselves out into a moonlit night recently and I tried to take them for a walk on a trail that it helps to be able to see. (One joy of our neighborhood is that we’ve got this little pocket darkness within walking distance of our house.) It was already late, we hadn’t planned this, so I had to settle for a few yards into the woods and an agreement to try again next month when I’d given everyone fair warning. (more…)

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Posted in Reading | No Comments »

An Amended Plan

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

    Steam coils from the bath

    Befogged glasses slide tubward

    The book is reshelved

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Tags: haiku
Posted in Play, Poem, Reading | No Comments »

Reading Aloud versus Acting It Out

Monday, April 4th, 2011

Some complaining a few weeks ago on Twitter has turned into more thought about books, audiobooks, and screenplays over at the Pop Culture Divas. Check it out! You can comment about your favorite format, and cheer me on in my Script Frenzy project.

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Posted in Reading, Script Frenzy | No Comments »

Reading for “Fun”

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Lately, while I haven’t been writing a lot, I’ve been checking out stacks of books from the library. My mission is threefold. First, knock some titles off the TBR pile—our library’s catalog lets you save a list of books you’re interested in, and mine is now four pages long. Second, I’m looking for an author or book that is (sort of) like mine, for those “John Updike meets The Wizard of Oz” comparisons—or, more likely, to see what agents are thanked in the acknowledgments. The third reason is also infotainment. I’ve been watching a lot of TV, and while that’s a quick way to see how story and character can be revealed, it’s visual, not verbal; I miss this aspect of technique if I only study shows. (more…)

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Posted in Process, Reading, TV | No Comments »

Thrilled to Pick a Book to Read

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

I’m excited about a new book, and I haven’t even started reading it. I entered a contest on Goodreads for an ARC of Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution, by Michelle Moran because the blurb is everything I love about creative writing. The novel follows Tussaud through the French Revolution, which she survived despite her ties to nobility because of her skills as a sculptor–she made death masks of some of the nobles who were executed.

It’s not so much the specifics that thrill me (although I am interested in the French revolution) as the combination of factors, the indication of an author being someone who has swirled past some information and become intrigued, read some tidbit and thought, “There’s a story there.” (more…)

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Posted in Creativity, Reading, Review | No Comments »

Teenage Boys and Reading

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

When I was in high school, some of my favorite books were the Mrs. Pollifax mysteries. If you’re unfamiliar, the 65-or-so-year-old Mrs. Pollifax was feeling put out to pasture, thought needlework was for the birds, and so she got herself a job as a courier for the CIA. None of the courier jobs stay simple, of course, but she disarms the bad guys with a mix of little old ladyness and karate. In between I read Cold War spy thrillers by Helen MacInnes. After the seventeenth one, I complained to my dad that “Anything could be in those briefcases. I can’t believe you’d really kill somebody over it!”* I switched to Rex Stout and Agatha Christie and shared books with my grandmother; I loved Archie Goodwin and thought Hercule Poirot was a twerp. (more…)

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Posted in Parenting, Reading | 13 Comments »

Villiers, How I Love Thee

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Maybe I'd better stop making fun of e-readers

I am revising, really I am, but I’m also taking a little writing break and doing some extra reading. I got more Georgette Heyer Regencies out of the library and broke down and bought one that came highly recommended. I’ve also succumbed to Eloisa James’s Desperate Duchesses. More accurately, to the Duke of Villiers, a chess-playing rake who’s got enough money and rank to be casual about the rules of society.

There are six duchess books. It turns out I started with book 2. Villiers spends most of that novel on what’s possibly his deathbed, having gotten himself wounded in a duel and then into the hands of the sort of doctor that is one of the main reasons I’m not nostalgic about this time period. (more…)

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Posted in Characters, Reading | No Comments »

In Which Georgette Heyer and Remington Steele Are Juxtaposed

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

I stumbled across Remington Steele on Hulu and figured I’d take the opportunity to actually see the show.

It’s a detective show that was on the air from 1982 to 1987. For a variety of reasons, my access to TV as a kid was spotty, and in spite of the crush-worthy Pierce Brosnan, I’d only seen a couple of episodes.

As an adult, it turns out a big part of its appeal for me was seeing office supplies from the 1980s. The clocks! The computers! The big chunky phones with cords! A VW Rabbit as a glam car,’80s clothes, ’80s hair (and, oh, okay, ’80s Pierce Brosnan). (more…)

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Posted in Process, Reading, TV | No Comments »

First Pages

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

My Monday morning writing club has an ongoing argument about the importance of a quick start to a novel: diving right in versus a slower reveal. The rulemeisters say it’s all got to be there on the first page: meet the hero, introduce the conflict, set the tone and genre. The first page makes a promise to the reader that must be fulfilled. “But I’m not writing a thriller,” one of the clubbers says, or “Surely that’s for genre fiction, not literary.”

I, for a change, agree with the finger waggers on this one. I finally took my own advice and pulled some books I’ve read—so I know the story—and reread the first few pages. I am blown away with what I see this time around. Here’s my short stack: (more…)

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Posted in Process, Reading, Writing | No Comments »

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