Hi All!

Wow, we’re midway through March already! I’m not sure where we are on the lion-lamb continuum that this month is supposed to represent, but supposedly we might get hit by yet another storm tomorrow? The weather-related excitement continues!

It’s been a busy winter/spring for me so far, but I’m hoping things will be a little calmer going forward. Work was full of, well, work in February, which didn’t leave me much time for writing-related stuff. However, I am, slowly and painfully, pulling myself together to put out the illustrated box set of The Midnight Land, possibly on Kickstarter, so if all goes well, you should be hearing more about that in the upcoming months.

I’m also contemplating various future book projects. You will probably also hear more about this in upcoming months/years, so stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I’m in search of fantasy and romantasy reading recommendations. Bonus points if it has anti-war message or in some way tries to be anti-war, because then I can count it towards my day job research 🙂 If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

As for my own recommendations, I’m currently partway through two books: the Andy Serkis-narrated audiobook of The Hobbit and the ebook of The Forest is the Path by Gary Lightbody. I highly recommend them both! Serkis once again knocks it out of the park with his narration of The Hobbit. Seriously, if you haven’t listened to his narrations of Tolkien’s work, you are missing out. I’m also struck by how great The Hobbit is as a story. It’s obviously a bedtime story for children and is completely absurd on so many levels, and yet somehow it is completely compelling. I’m still thinking about why, but one thing I can say for certain is that inspiration runs throughout it. The importance of inspiration is something that I think about a lot, although I don’t have any firm answers yet. Maybe this should be research project #3—or maybe research is inevitably inimical to it?

Speaking of inspiration, though, I am finding The Forest is the Path riveting. It’s a kind of companion book to the album of the same name, although you don’t have to listen to the album to read the book, and vice versa. I’m only about halfway through it (and it’s not very long), but roughly speaking, it’s Gary Lightbody’s memoir about his attempts to deal with his father’s death from Alzheimer’s disease. Lightbody is in my opinion one of the finest lyricists of the 21st century, and the book’s prose style bears the hallmarks of a poet’s mind: it’s tightly compressed, each line saturated with imagery and emotion.

As in his song lyrics, Lightbody infuses each moment with deeply personal, intensely relatable feelings, set against a backdrop of cosmic grandeur. Whether he’s dealing with the at-times absurd bureaucracy of death, or trying to figure out how to keep his shoes dry while caught by high tide on a walk, he brings both a very human humor and warmth, and an almost hallucinatory sense of awe before the extra-human natural world, to each scene. He also contemplates the nature of time and memory as he tries to piece together his knowledge of his father and face the destruction of his father’s own memory, sense of self, and existence in linear time. Intermixed with this is his account of writing the next album and the experience of bringing something new into the world in the aftermath of a life-altering tragedy.

That might make it sound heavy, but while The Forest is the Path deserves attentive reading, it’s a short, sometimes funny, ultimately uplifting (I’m guessing, since I know the result is a creatively and commercially successful album) book. Definitely recommend for anyone dealing with grief, interested in creativity, or who just enjoys some well-written prose.

What about you? Do you have any reading or listening recommendations? Let me know!

E.P. Clark