Ahab’s Wife the book; just getting better and better

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Ahab's Wife, fiction, novels, postaday2013, Reading

The gift that my cousin Nancy gave me, the book Ahab’s Wife, is revealing itself to be one of the better written books that I have read in a long while. The author’s ease with descriptive language is pretty incredible and it is giving me inspiration for my own novel. The descriptive language that the authoress employs is used towards nature, thoughts, relationships and the physical persons in the heroine’s, Una is her name, world whereas I use descriptive language to describe food, cooking, eating and tasting. I think that I will try to incorporate more descriptive language to further communicate the sense of what Paris or now the lack of Paris means to my own heroine, now that she is ready to travel overseas to the new world.

I have often heard that to be a good writer, one needs to read a lot. Now that I have been at Ahab’s Wife for a while; reading a writing style that really has drawn me in and impressed me in a way that I haven’t been since I don’t know when, I feel moved to better my own writing. I know that I could seriously use improvement in my writing style. I think that for my novel, my style may be a little to matter of fact, not descriptive enough. I need to learn how to paint a scene with my words, I know that I paint scenes surrounding food and eating, I would like to try and branch out to my characters surroundings, feelings and physical persons.

It will always be a work progress just the way I am a work in progress as a person. That’s fine, I hope that I will get better as I continue writing, only time will tell.

My newest read these days

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Ahab's Wife, blogging, books, Captain Ahab, postaday2013, Reading, writing

The latest book that I am reading was a gift from my cousin Nancy, she passed it along to me when we went to see her on Mother’s Day weekend. It’s written by Sena Jeter Naslund who also authored Four Spirits, the title of her latest book is Ahab’s Wife or, The Star Gazer.

I just started it and I really like the writing style, I love the concept of exploring the wife’s story, the character off the pages of Moby Dick, who stayed on shore tending the home fires while the husband is traipsing throughout the seas on a crazy quest. The book’s first chapter is called Extracts and it is a few pages of extract after extract from Herman Melville’s classic showing the existence of Captain Ahab’s wife.

Once the fact that Captain Ahab did indeed have a wife is well established, we then get to meet her and follow her through her own story. I am curious to see how getting to know Captain Ahab’s wife, her name is Una by the way, will impact my appreciation of Moby Dick after all these years.

So far I have learned that Una is very close to her mother and has a difficult time of it with her father. This in and of itself isn’t so uncommon, girls and their fathers can often clash but I am waiting to see if this will affect her later in life when men enter her life.

I am very intrigued as to what type of woman would be attracted to a personality such as Captain Ahab’s and I suspect that I will see how huge the transformation of Ahab’s psyche must have been after his encounter with the beast and the impact on their relationship. Quite interesting if you ask me.