Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Shore Enough


Reading John Updike's Hugging the Shore is an experience everyone should have who enjoys the fine details of word selection, sentence construction, and otherwise great writing. This collection of Updike's (mostly) book reviews and essays from (primarily) the mid-1980s shows him at the height of his powers. At the time JU was writing a book review per month for the New Yorker, and most of the reviews in this collection are from those years when Jonathan Raban, Saul Bellow and others were in full swing in the literary limelight.

I read collections like this (which would be "dry" to most) precisely because one can study the nuances of the craft of writing and gauge the context of thought inside carefully chosen language.

These collections give me enough gumption to admit where my deficiencies are and try to correct them. I find myself asking questions like:

Do I need to work harder?
Do I need to rise earlier?
Do I need to stay on task for a longer period of time, and write fewer pages to produce better work?
Do I need to cut off a couple fingers and collect insurance?

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