Monthly Archives: January 2020

Inadvertent by Karl Ove Knausgård

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This essay cuts to the heart of what writing is with the clarity of a diamond. Knausgaard talks about his failures and successes in trying to write authentically without artifice or pretension. His method involves stripping away all hindrances to capturing the truth of a moment or an experience. He also writes eloquently about the ways that culture and common beliefs shape the way we see the world, literally constructing the world we inhabit. He touches on how science, for example, colours the way we see the world, but stumbles in helping us to answer the big philosophical questions that children naturally ask, but adults learn to stop wondering about. What is the world? How did it come into existence? What is the meaning of our time here on earth? I plan to keep reading as much Knausgaard as I can get my hands on. A modern-day Proust who writes with the unashamed honesty of a Sartre or Beauvoir.



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Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice by Colum McCann

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, McCann’s book contains lots of really helpful little gems for the young (and not so young) writer. The prose is fresh, honest and pleasantly surprising, and refreshingly free of tired old cliches like ‘show don’t tell’. Covers all the aspects of being a writer, from seeking inspiration to dealing with frustration and failure, finding an agent, not finding an agent, etc, etc.



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A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I’ve been looking forward to reading this for some time and it did not disappoint. Knausgaard is rigorously honest, but most if this honesty is targeted at himself and his own (often ‘unacceptable’) thoughts and feelings. He comes across as an outsider looking in on life, in the tradition of Sartre’s Roquentin in Nausea. The writing also poignantly and painfully describes the distance between us all even when we are close. A fine piece of literature that belongs amongst the best in the existentialist canon.



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A Writer’s Paris: A Guided Journey For The Creative Soul by Eric Maisel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A writing friend recommended this to me for my recent self-arranged writing residency in Paris and it was perfect. Bite-sized pieces that I could read each day for inspiration about places/things/attitudes to get me in right frame of mind for creating. And it had a very important message which I heeded – to write in Paris you have to sit on your bum for many hours and write! The writing won’t just appear from endlessly swanning around Paris’s glorious streets, although I made sure i did a bit of that too…



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