Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. Read this book. It's hard and grim and occasionally funny and it's the way every one should write about their lives: not writing the life you wished for, but embracing the one you had. There was something incredibly invigorating and inspiring about these pages. Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, doesn't spare us one moment of ugliness or brutality but the simplicity of the prose is a counterpoint to the intensity of emotion and experience pouring off each page.
If you're a bit of a delicate petal like me, after you've read Ham on Rye you're going to need something to pick you up again. For me that was AA Milne's The Sunny Side - "short stories and poems for proper grown ups". This was the stuff that Milne was writing before Pooh took over his life. The writings in here are pure, lighthearted delight from beginning to end, without a whisper of cynicism or meanness. It made me want to go back and read through all my Wodehouse.
Of course, a really good actor can often give a clue to the feelings of a character simply by facial expression. There are ways of shifting the eyebrows, distending the nostrils, and exploring the lower molars with the tongue by which it is possible to denote respectively Surprise, Defiance and Doubt. Indeed, irresolution being the keynote of Hamlet's soliloquy, a clever player could to some extent indicate the whole thirty lines by a silent working of the jaw. But at the same time it would be impossible to deny that he would miss the finer shades of the dramatist's meaning. "The insolence of office, and the spurns" - to take only one line - would tax the most elastic face.Top 5 Songs:
Say Hey (I Love You) by Michael Franti & Spearhead
Daughters of the Northern Coast by Australian Crawl
You Better You Bet by The Who
Mercury Blues by David Linley
Moira Jane's Café by Definition of Sound
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