About Textual Sphinx
(Originally posted on fanfiction.net)I am twice your age with half your experience.
Job: visual artist.
Hobby: playing with language.
Email: textualsphinx@hotmail.com
Now signed up as as Textualsphinx, since numerous Sphinxes have appeared in Potterdom since I first chose the name from Goblet of Fire. (Grr - couldn't they have checked first?) I've kept the original moniker here so that you can still find me....
House:
Gryffindor Super-ego, Ravenclaw Ego, Slytherin Inner Brat - but few quizzez
are so Freudian.
I usually get Sorted to Gryffindor. I don't know why. My fics are Slytherin-sympathetic with Ravenclaw leanings.
A random selection from my favourite books:
Zadie Smith: "White Teeth" (A Must-read if you want to understand England.)
Adam Thorpe: "Ulverton" (ditto. *Incredible* language. A masterpiece.
He hasn't matched it since.)
Toni Morrison: "Beloved" (of course), "Paradise".
Italo Calvino: "Invisible Cities"
Bertolt Brecht: "The Good Person of Setchuan" and all his theoretical writings.
Augusto Boal: "Theatre of the Oppressed" (a classic. More radical than Brecht).
Michel Foucault's "History of Sexuality".
Charlotte Bronte: "Villette" (Better than "Jane Eyre", neurotic where
"Wuthering Heights" is psychotic.)
Primo Levi: "If This is A Man", "If Not Now, When"
Jean Rhys: "Good Morning Midnight" and "Wide Sargasso Sea"
George Elliot: "Middlemarch", "Daniel Deronda"
Jeanette Winterson: "The Passion"
Albert Camus: "La Peste"
Silvia Plath: "The Bell Jar"
Angela Carter: "Nights at the Circus"
Kasuo Ishiguro: "An Artist of the Floating World"
Darien Leader: "Why do Women Write More Letters than they Post?"
Milan Kundera: "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" and "The Unbearable
Lightness of Being" (Overlook his sexism, because his analysis of Kitsch
is so memorable.)
Linda Grant: "When I Lived in Modern Times"
Tracy Chevalier: "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (take me to Delft NOW) and
"Falling Angels".
Fantasy (for the under-20s)
Ursula Le Guin: 'Wizard of Earthsea' quartet.
Elizabeth A. Romey: "Lera of Tymoria, the Dragon Mage".