writing

“Recollections of My Nonexistence” by Rebecca Solnit

June 28, 2021 by Sonia Connolly 3 Comments

Recommended to me by: Reading her other books, and her talk at Powell’s Books on zoom with Jia Tolentino on March 9, 2021.

Rebecca Solnit is a powerful, clear, lyrical writer. I thought her memoir might be literary and opaque, but instead it is luminously down to earth.

It contains brief descriptions of violence against women as she describes her ongoing dread that one day she would be the target. She shares the process of finding her voice amid the pressure to remain silent and unheard as a woman.

She describes living in a lovely studio apartment in San Francisco for 25 years, and the gentrification she witnessed in her neighborhood over that time. She invites us along on her widening explorations of the western US and the connections she made with environmentalists, anti-nuclear protestors, and Native Americans defending their land.

At the end of the book she comes back around to violence against women, and the writing of her explosively popular essay Men Explain Things To Me, which inspired the term “mansplaining.” She points out that the #MeToo movement was a tipping point built from many women speaking up and gaining power and gaining allies. We don’t know what may follow from our small actions against big problems. Keep taking the small actions that are available to you.

Highly recommended.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Steering the Craft” by Ursula K. Le Guin

January 29, 2020 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

Recommended to me by: Justine Larbalestier

A writing manual about the tools of the writing trade: punctuation, grammar, voice, point of view. This compact book is carefully detailed, wryly kind, deeply knowledgeable. It arose out of writing workshops that Le Guin offered, and has been revised for the 21st century with references to twitter and online workshops. She includes sample passages from classics, and tells us what she admires about them. Each chapter ends with a writing exercise and how to learn from it.

I felt in safe hands. I’d like to go back and do the writing exercises sometime, especially with a group. I write essays, not stories, so not everything applies, but I’m sure it would still be helpful.

Highly recommended for anyone who writes stories, or anyone (like me) eager to read anything written by Ursula K. Le Guin, who is sorely missed.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Dreyer’s English” by Benjamin Dreyer

August 12, 2019 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

Recommended to me by: Jesse-the-K’s rave review

This book is both a useful guide to writing well in English, and an entertaining quick read that includes the occasional jab at the current occupant of the White House. Benjamin Dreyer is persnickety and opinionated, as befits the Copy Chief at Random House. He holds forth on grammar rules that can be safely ignored and ones that can’t, easily misspelled words, easily misspelled names, and words that tend to be confused with each other.

One can see his process of becoming more educated on social justice issues. There is one inexplicable balk at using work-hours instead of man-hours (seriously?!) but otherwise his language in the book is inclusive of women. He admits that he also balked at using singular they until he had a colleague who uses they pronouns.

Recommended for writers and others interested in the vagaries of the English language.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Conversations on Writing” by Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon

December 9, 2018 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Recommended to me by: sturgeonslawyer

I read this because I will read anything by Ursula K. Le Guin, and alas there won’t be more wise words from her to read. I feel her loss as an emptiness in the world where her steadiness and integrity used to be.

The book is an edited transcription of radio interviews with David Naimon of KBOO here in Portland, divided into sections for fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. It includes a few excerpts by Le Guin and others that she referred to in their conversations.

A short, choppy book, great for learning little bits about Le Guin and about writing and about reading and about life.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“EPUB Straight to the Point” by Elizabeth Castro

January 3, 2017 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders

Recommended to me by: Finding it at the library

Creating an epub ebook from an InDesign print book file involves a whole lot of hidden settings and mysterious outcomes. I read a lot of blog posts, and this book was also helpful in getting the details squared away. It has step by step instructions for creating an epub ebook from Word and InDesign, and then further step by step instructions for editing the epub directly to refine the results. Since I learned HTML before CSS was a thing, and epub uses CSS, this was helpful to get oriented. It’s from 2011, but still useful.

It has some iPad-specific details, like a list of the fonts it supports and previews of each.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“The Non-Designer’s InDesign Book” by Robin Williams

August 1, 2016 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Essential design techniques for print projects

Recommended to me by: Finding it at the library

I’m formatting my book with Adobe InDesign. While it does work to do a web search to find out how to do things like add more pages to the book, or move a title farther down the page, I decided I wanted more of an overview of the whole program and its features.

A friend suggested checking a book out of the library. This was perfect, because I could check out several books and see which one I liked, and since I have an older version of the program, older books were just right.

This book won because it is inviting, clear, direct, and brief. The design examples are varied and interesting (not all for sports and bars). Some of the examples are even from “Mothering Magazine”! While Robin doesn’t address book projects, the aesthetics and attention to detail in her examples fit in with how I work. Not only am I happy to support a woman author of a technical book, I feel more at home reading her book.

Highly recommended if you need to wrestle with InDesign CS5. I got her Photoshop book too, and I’m looking forward to reading that next, to work on the book cover and interior illustrations.

Available at Powell’s Books.