Main event: Tree of Smoke Denis Johnson’s well received novel about Vietnam
Sideshows: The Art of Knotting and Splicing, Cyrus Lawrence Day and Peter Owen’s The Book of Decorative Knots (I intend to work on my decorative marlinespike skills and crack the Turk’s Head and Matthew Walker knots)
Everett Allen’s A Wind to Shake the World, was supposed to be a main event, but I read it on Wednesday and had to get another of his: Martha’s Vineyard: An Elegy. I know of very little good Vineyard fiction — the place was infested with great writers: John Hersey, William Styron, Lillian Hellman — but of novels set on the island, other than the predictable regional who-dun-its, I know of none.
I hope to get a ton of writing done, and in my experience over-reading leads to under-writing.
