My favorite novels

September 16, 2010 By

I don't miss much of my old life in San Francisco, but I do miss being able to go to good bookstores and buy books.

Bob Bly, one of the world’s best copywriters — or at least one of the world’s most influential due to his books on copywriting — posted a list of his 10 favorite novels (and one play). That made me think about the novels, poetry, and plays that had a big influence on me and my writing style.

My criteria was that the books had to be ones that I loved at the time, reread several times, and which I still love now. So here’s my list, organized the time period in which I first read them:

Childhood

Where the Wild Things Are

The Winnie the Pooh books

Teens

Watership Down

Dune (the 3-part series)

Pickwick Papers

College

The Sun Also Rises

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Hamlet (and pretty much all Shakespeare)

Poetry by William Blake, Keats, Byron, Yeats, and T.S. Eliot

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Joseph Conrad’s short stories (especially those narrated by “Marlow,” including Youth and Heart of Darkness)

The Plague

Post college/Adulthood

War and Peace

Master and Margarita

Catch-22

The Importance of Being Earnest

Arms and the Man

A Confederacy of Dunces

These are books that I’ve read and reread many times — and will probably do so again. Though I’m not sure about the Dune series. Also, I reread Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a few years ago and was totally bored by it; the writing is great, but I just didn’t care about Stephen Dedalus anymore and didn’t understand why the novel spoke to me so deeply when I was younger.

I notice several things about this list:

  • I like books that start with a “W”
  • I like humor, especially irony and wit (another “W”)
  • I like adventure

Most of all, this helps me see that I’m drawn to a certain writing style, which you can find in Winnie the Pooh and Watership Down all the way through to War and Peace. It’s the “high” style, a style which is direct and clear, but has a high level of diction.

Which novels, poetry, and plays have had the most influence on you as a writer?

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Quick tip for Gmail users

March 11, 2010 By

If you use Gmail and access other email accounts through your Gmail account, you probably know that Gmail checks the other accounts based on how often they get email. So if you don’t get a lot of email through the other accounts, they might only get checked once an hour. That can be annoying. You know that someone has sent you an email, to one of those other accounts, and to get it you have to manually go into the settings and force Gmail to check the account.

There’s no way — yet — to get Gmail to check those accounts, but this little tip will let you check them much faster. Go into Labs (in your Settings) and enable “Refresh POP accounts.” Then click Save Changes and go back to your Inbox. You’ll see a “Refresh” link to the right of the “More actions” button at the top of the list of your emails.

Email refresh link

Now, all you need to do is click on that link and Gmail will check your other email accounts.

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: ,

Say bye-bye to bi- words

February 4, 2010 By

A couple times this week, I’ve come across issues with bi- words. The first time, it was “bi-monthly.” Now, is that twice a month or every two months? The second time, it was “bi-weekly.” Is that twice a week, or every two weeks? I’m just not sure.

You see the problem, right?

This is a great example of the Curse of Knowledge, which I often summarize as “just because you know what you’re talking about doesn’t mean anybody else does.” You simply can’t use these words to say what you want to say, clearly and with no confusion, unless your audience already knows exactly what you’re referring to. Best to avoid them.

All of which seems so obvious to me that I feel I must be insulting your intelligence. Yet I come across things like this all the time — and am probably guilty of doing it too. It’s so easy for us to forget that other people might have no idea what we’re talking about.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

New website

October 21, 2009 By

Just launched the new carlthoren.com. For the past year, I had my site up on Apple’s MobileMe, which was easy to set up, but expensive and inflexible. For this new site, I used WordPress, which I love, in conjunction with the easy-to-use and modify Atahualpa theme. I highly recommend this theme: It’s the only one I’ve come across which provides a control panel with hundreds of design and site options that take care of the CSS for you. And if you do need to add some custom code, it’s usually obvious what you need to do. It’s a free theme that can pretty much do everything. Amazing.

Part of this new carlthoren.com is having a blog, which I hope to update with random thoughts, observations, and updates for anyone who might find them interesting. Nobody’s really that interested in other people’s opinions and ideas… yet it’s nice to have a forum for sharing your own, all the same.

Filed Under: Uncategorized