X was a toughie and I actually could not find one that I wanted to write about, so I ended up picking a short story instead – Xingu by Edith Wharton. For Within Books(ahem, short stories) for the letter X, I bring you the short list of authors and books(real and fictional) mentioned in this brilliantly wicked short. You can read it online on Gutenberg or other places.

And here is the list promised – which ones are real, and which ones fictional? I leave that for you to find out for yourselves!! I have provided links for each of them – for more information or to the book/author page itself as required. Click on them to find out more 🙂

• • Osric Dane’s ‘Wings of Death’ and ‘The Supreme Instant’
  • Trollope
  • The Encyclopedia Britannica
  • Mary Augusta(Mrs.Humphry) Ward’s ‘Robert Elsmere‘
  • ‘The Data of Ethics‘
  • Appropriate Allusions 
  • Prince Rupert’s manière noire
  • Karl Marx
  • Professor Bergson
  • Confessions of St. Augustine
  • Mendelism
  • Wordsworth
  • Verlaine
  • Reader’s Handbook (link provided is a maybe this was what the author was referring to, based on the context of this story)
  • Smith’s “Classical Dictionary”

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Y is for the book You Read to Me & I’ll Read to You: Stories to Share from the 20th Century

For Within Books from this one, I bring to you, well, just about every story that is a part of this treasure of a collection. My kids and I read from this years ago, and we followed the title to a letter – I read to them and they read to me, and I cherish those memories everyday. (Note on this point: While this book is not written in a style of books meant for two people to read to each other, we can simply pick passages or sections we want to read to each other and then, voila, it is a read-to-each-other book!)

When I picked it out from our home library to look into it for the post here, my daughter’s first remark was ‘I loved to read these stories with you’ and her favorite story (even without having looked into it for years) – the retelling of the three little pigs (and yes, it is a brilliant story to read). While my first thought was to pick just a couple of stories for this post, it is truly difficult to do so when each and every one is better than the rest. So, go ahead and check out this book for yourself and discover the magical stories that lie within this book.  

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Z is for Zen in the Art of Writing:Essays on Creativity by Ray Bradbury. This has been a ‘want-to-read’ on my list for a long time and I am finally getting around to reading it. For Within Books, I bring to you quotes, or more truly – writing advice from a writer truly passionate about writing. Through his essays in this book, he admonishes us to read – read poetry, read what we know and like, and to read the unfamiliar, the unknown; to write – write a short story every week for years, write down words, write down feelings, write just about every and any thought that appears; to watch movies (the old ones!); to keep working at it; to relax; to live; to love!!

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”
“For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.”
“At heart, all good stories are the one kind of story, the story written by an individual man from his individual truth.”
“So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”
“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
“The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?”
“I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.”
“When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange — we’re so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.”
“I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and who I was after the doing. Each tale was a way of finding selves.”
“Let us remain childlike and not childish in our 20-20 vision, borrowing such telescopes, rockets, or magic carpets as may be needed to hurry us along to miracles of physics as well as dream.”
“How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”

“If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is – excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.”

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For facts and interesting discoveries within books, read my other posts so far by clicking on the links for each letter/day

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