A Week in the Books – Links I Loved the Week of 7/20/18

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Happy Friday! I’m a little light on links this week, because we’ve been spending as much time as we can practicing riding bikes and at the park and pool. We’re feeling the dog-days of summer, but we’re also trying to enjoy the weeks we have left before school starts. My kids haven’t quite mastered their bikes yet, but it’s exciting to watch them practice and face their fears.

A few reads to start your weekend:

Forget a Fast Car. Creativity is the New Midlife Crisis Cure – The New York Times

This is a good follow-up to yesterday’s post on Digging Out from Under the Invisible Mental Load. The need to engage our brains in different ways is not, of course, exclusive to women.

More, of course, does not mean more things or the outward trappings of youth. Instead, it’s a look inward, to passions and possibilities long thought to have passed.

New “Read More Women” Series from Electric Literature – Publisher’s Weekly

This new biweekly series is a response to the New York Times’ “By The Book” series, by Andy Weir–in which he cited no women authors. I’m linking to the Publisher’s Weekly article because I love Lauren Groff’s quote:

It is vastly important to read more female authors: to see women as worthy of our imagination and respect, to understand a woman’s full humanity, to reclaim authors who have been unjustly forgotten by time because of their gender, to meet the minds of geniuses new to us, to expand the canon, and to work toward the equality of all humans that is promised by the better angels of our society, but which in our actions and silent and insidious biases we so often fail.

You can find the new series at Electric Literature, and my 30 Twentieth Century Classics by Women post can get you started reading more women authors!

Creative Inspiration from Ira Glass

I love This American Life and don’t get a chance to listen as often as I’d like. Ira Glass constructs such compelling stories, told slowly over the course of his hourlong show. But he didn’t always know how to do this.

If you’re creating this weekend, don’t be afraid to do it badly.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

And my one name-dropping opportunity in life: I once had dinner with Ira Glass. In college, I worked for an office that brought him to campus for a large event, so I got to attend the VIP dinner. I was too shy to talk to him much, though he seemed very nice and charming. The event was an on-stage interview with acclaimed graphic novelist Chris Ware, who I sat with at dinner (he was shy, self-deprecating, very funny, and seemed out of his element). I’m not much of a celebrity seeker–I can appreciate their work without feeling the need to meet them–but I love that my name-drop is two great storytellers who got together to talk about telling stories.

For some pre-weekend fun: what’s your best celebrity meeting/name drop story?