Story. Stories. Storytelling. Beats the heart of the novel. I’d never thought of how it’s the story not the writing that makes a novel a novel until I began reading on Thursday night Story Genius by Lisa Cron when I was two-thirds of the way through Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir A Circle of Quiet. A week…
Tag: Reading
Left Neglected: A Book Review
Left Neglected is a novel about an intelligent, driven, Type A woman, Sarah Nickerson, who crashes her car and injures her brain due to driver distraction. My review from a brain injury perspective.
How Not to Format a Narrative with Study Guide
A 20th anniversary edition should be a beautifully and accessibly designed integration of the original two books. Not a slapped together one!
Birthday Gift to Myself
Birthdays aren’t usually a topic on my blog, but this year, the sun is out, the sky is blue, my life has been upended for over a year, and I’m musing over this ⤵️ What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)? My reading. Yeah, I know “found (and kept)” denotes an object. But…
Universe Hates Me Chronicles
Twitter is Xed. My hot water tank that gushed water was replaced by a Giant-manufacturer-dented tank that the customer service supervisor doesn’t want to replace with an undamaged one since transport companies have a habit of bunging up a tank en route from factory to Toronto and so they can’t get me the energy efficient…
Reading Chapter x Chapter x Chapter
Lindamood-Bell’s visualizing and verbalizing program to restore reading comprehension starts with an image, a sentence, and builds up to a chapter and then finally chapter by chapter, just like normal reading. You visualize as you read; at the end, you verbalize. It’s a lot more difficult to visualize several chapters in a row then verbalize…
You Would Not Want My Morning Ritual
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like? Oh wow. Talk about a question getting into the heart of life with brain injury, one that didn’t receive neuron-healing treatments for years and then only experimentally at first then one at a time over decades. And one with very…
My Life’s Opening Sentence
You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence? I read mysteries. I live one, too. Brain injury is like a mystery. A grey and white thing hidden inside a roundish bony thing, the brain does its thing, running us and our bodies mysteriously until it is injured. None can see the damage. Not with their…
What Makes Reading Enjoyable?
I believed in reading strategies because I believed in my therapist—until I finally had to admit they were an illusion. I sat opposite my therapist, focusing effortfully on her lesson. She was teaching me how to read post-concussion using strategies: highlighters to highlight words I needed to remember; pens to write notes in the margins…