The Sound of Music
Whoops. Missed a day of blogging yesterday in the promised seven-days-of-blogging. Hmmm … maybe I need to come up with a name for this event. Unfortunately Blogfest is taken. I should have thought about this earlier. Either way, I’m surprised that I’ve been this good about posting considering my less than stellar track record around here.
I realize that recommending another book in the same week that my own book comes out is kind of a silly thing to do from a promotional standpoint, but I’m kind of a silly person. Besides, the book I’m going to recommend isn’t really my competition, but it does follow the theatrical theme (and it’s like three times the price, so Show, Don’t Tell is clearly the bargain here.)
During my crazy writing blitz of the past couple months I made sure that I read every night before bed. If I don’t do that, I’ll keep writing until lights out, which always results in me being unable to shut off my brain and actually fall asleep. And if I don’t get a good three to four hours of sleep a night you can’t do anything with me the next day. Nor would you want to. So reading is very important to me—and to those around me—in these crash periods.
One of the best books I read during this time was Home: A Memoir of My Early Years by Julie Andrews.
First of all, it is almost sickening that one person can be this talented. She was blessed with a beautiful singing voice (that, tragically, a bad surgery has all but demolished) and is clearly a terrific actress, but I never knew what an incredibly talented writer she is. This book is stunningly written. It mainly deals with her childhood in vaudeville and the early part of her stage career. Though she certainly lived an interesting life, it’s the way that she writes about the mundane aspects of her world, her family, and childhood playmates (who tended to be adults) that kept me enthralled. This is not some scandalous tell all that seems to be all the rage in celebrity books. This is a sweet, simple story of a young girl in a more innocent time. And it is so NOT my usual reading choice, but I am really glad that I picked it up. So, after you get finished reading Show, Don’t Tell, I suggest you pick up this one too.
Oh, and on a unrelated musical theatre topic, the “Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber Night” on American Idol was nothing more than a series of huge mistakes. HUGE. Which, pretty much, everyone else has said as well. But really, Memory?