On my shelf this week:
Creating Short Fiction: The Classic Guide to Writing Short Fiction, by Damon Knight
Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
What to Read When: The Books and Stories to Read with Your Child—And All the Best Times to Read Them, by Pam Allyn
This week I’m reading one of the masters at short fiction, one of the masters at science fiction and one of the masters at advocating for children’s literacy. All of them are fantastic.
Best quotes so far:
“Your first job is to find out your strengths and weaknesses, and your second is to learn to get the most out of what you have.”
Damon Knight
“You ought to be a generalist—you ought to have a scattered general knowledge of all kinds of things, in order to be able to see the broad relationships that are often invisible to a specialist.”
Damon Knight
“The most valuable thing you can learn is how to use your own experiences to help you project yourself in imagination into the lives of other people. Write what you know, by all means, when you can, but fill in the spaces by finding out what you need to know.”
Damon Knight
“In every classroom, there is one unfailingly successful tool for unlocking the door to literacy for all children, and that is the read-aloud: the book that is read by the teacher to her students: the shared experience.”
Pam Allyn
Read any of these? Tell us what you thought.
