Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Words

I'm reading Pat Conroy's book, My Reading Life. I'm reading it slowly, chewing a few pages at a time. It's a book you read like that. This morning, I read some pages about his love of words: "Good writing. . . . is taking the nothingness of air and turning it into a pleasure palace built on a foundation of words." You see what I mean by needing to chew slowly?? He keeps a journal of words. When he reads a book, he writes down the words he reads that he likes. What a great idea. He said he just picks words that "please me, goad me into action, make me want to sing a song." Not fancy words, not what he calls pretentious words. Simply words that bring some kind of pleasure. I thought I'd try it today with HIS book. Here's the start of my list:
amulets
camouflage
mandrills
transcendent
hibiscus
dimpled
ethereal
anthem
limned
disconsolate

Yum.

5 comments:

  1. Love it! Thank you for writing about this, because I was feeling a little bit nerdy: I wrote an acrostic poem yesterday for my friend in the hospital and I used "delicious" words instead of words that only described him. I'll admit, I used some "pretentious" words, but that's because I like them, and I feel that they are underused just because they have more syllables/are harder to spell than words like "mad" or "happy." Thank you!!!

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  2. Thank you for sharing your reading life. Your list is yum indeed.
    Terje

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  3. What a great idea that you shared. I have Conroy's book, but still haven't read it. I love all his writing, & it sounds like this is a good example of it. It's neat that you are starting your own word list.

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  4. I like the idea of keeping a list of words, then somehow those words will creep into my thoughts and writing. I can see having kids collect words after they have read, might improve some vocabularies. Hmmmm. . .

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  5. Lovely list. I agree with elsie, it would be fun to show kids lists of words that we collect and encourage them to do the same. I guess it is about time I organize my writer's notebook and add a page just to collect yummy words.

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