Appendix A: Jane Austen, Flannery, Writing

• Love Jane Austen? Now she’s in comics!

• Most Britons have lied about the books they read—According to the survey, 65 percent of people have pretended to have read books, and of those, 42 percent singled out 1984. Next on the list came War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and in third place was James Joyce's Ulysses.

Kent here: Why do books continue to impress people, but so few other art forms are mentioned to “impress”? I mean, how many people lie about the classic films they've seen or Broadway musicals they've attended? Is it because persistence & dedication & understanding are required at an unusual depth for authoring books?

• Summer Writing: Going it by yourself is okay, but writing can be a solitary craft. Perfecting that craft w/strangers is often wiser than w/people who know us and place expectations upon us. So if you’re wanting to write, you need to attend a writing camp, convention, or class. Or, if you’re in the Midwest, try this festival. (You might see me there.)

• Janet Maslin at the New York Times states “Brad Gooch’s rapt, authoritative Flannery is the first major biography of a writer who died 44 years ago. Where is the flood of other biographical material about this mystical, ornery, ardently admired Southern writer?”

“It’s a wonderful children’s book,” she said about the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird by her fellow Southern loner Harper Lee. When she inquired about films by “this man Ingmar Bergman,” she came unusually close to identifying a kindred spirit steeped in spiritual rigor. “They too are apparently medieval,” she said, considering common ground between his works and her own.

Kent here: Maslin should’ve read Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which highlights O’Conner with three other Catholic writers who spanned the 20th Century. It’s a majestic read on writing, authors, and putting the spiritual on the page in a believable way.