The Ultimate Writing Assistant
If you’re a bookworm, I’m sure you think new book releases are one of the best things about starting a brand new year. Perhaps you’re waiting for the next volume of your favourite saga to drop, or maybe you’re just curious about your favourite author’s upcoming novel. If so, I hope the book you’re craving is featured on this list. If for some reason it is not, feel free to do some research on your own; maybe you’ll find a novel I didn’t.
Before I delve into my list, I want to make a few clarifications. You might be asking yourself, what is Children’s literature, exactly? Well, defining what fits and doesn’t within the realm of Children’s Literature is a bit tricky. Some of the works that are considered part of the canon of Children’s Literature, like Alice in Wonderland, were not originally written with children in mind as potential readers; the category of Children’s Literature as we know it nowadays is a fairly recent construction. This list, atone with the aforementioned definition, will feature books that were written with one potential reader-listener in mind: children.
Being a bookworm myself, I thought it necessary to start this new decade by making a personal list of some of the best books published in two thousand nineteen. The titles featured on this list stand out not only because of their popularity (some of them being best sellers), but also because of their literary quality. If you’re a bookworm too, you might have read some of them already, in which case I hope this list sheds some light into something you’ve not devoured just yet; on the other hand, if you’re just starting to approach anglo saxon literature, I sincerely hope you give at least one of these books a chance. Without further ado, let’s get right into the list.
The vocabularies of English and Spanish share some similarities. This realization will become more and more evident as you surround yourself with both languages (by listening to music, watching movies, reading, or talking to other learners), so don’t worry if you hadn’t thought about it until just now. Nowadays, most shared words usually belong to the field of technology: words like selfie, laptop, tweet, post, and Google are part of non-English speakers’ daily vocabulary. This is due to globalization and the rise and popularity of social media. But what about words like photograph and fotografía? Postpone and posponer? or carpet in English and carpeta in Spanish? What are their similarities all about? Do all of these words share the same meaning? Let’s take a quick linguistics power class.
Jane Austen, author of Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814) is a great example of someone that managed to thrive in a setting that seems to oppose the myth of privacy and solitude of the artist. Austen didn’t write in her room; there were seldom any opportunities for privacy in her cottage in Chawton, England. She lived with her mother, her sister, a close friend and three servants, in a household that would constantly be flooded with guests. Consequently, Jane Austen grew used to writing in small sheets of paper that could be easily hidden or covered when an unexpected guest made an appearance. Austen rose from bed before any of the other women in the house, played the piano, and organized the family breakfast to take place at nine in the morning. Breakfast was one of Austen’s main tasks in the household. After that, she settled down to write in the family’s sitting room until the afternoon. Her afternoons were spent reading aloud from novels, moments in which Austen would read her writings to her family. The vast amount of time that Jane Austen managed to invest in her writing was, in part, thanks to her sister Cassandra, who shouldered the majority of Jane Austen’s household chores. This was a major alleviation for the author, who once wrote “Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton & doses of rhubarb.”
Writer’s block is a common experience for those who dedicate themselves to writing. More often than not, the biographies of our favourite authors are filled with anecdotes of dry spells, droughts of inspiration and creative infertility, all of which points towards an unacknowledged, often ignored truth: no one is free from the writer’s curse, and every writer has to devise their own way of breaking it, even if only momentarily.
