I was really all askew with my reading materials this past trip. I brought too few books by far. Fortunately, I found a couple I’ve been looking for, and those are off in the media links to the left.
Meantime, I finished two others I’d been working on. First was William Goldsmith’s Which Lie Did I Tell? This is a continuation of his writing (see Adventures in the Screen Trade) about his screenwriting career, and serves as combination autobiography, kiss-n-tell, background exploration of the movies he’s written, and a genuinely interesting and educational discussion of the screenwriting trade, from how to write a script for sale to how to write one for the screen (two very different things).
Goldsmith was the writer for Oscar-winners such as All the President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as The Princess Bride, Maverick, Misery, and Absolute Power. He knows whereof he speaks, both in how to tell a good story (whether adapted or created yourself) and how to work it through the Hollywood process.
A great read, one that can be easily set down and picked back up again (it was my “Walking to Lunch Reading” book), both informative and entertaining. Recommended.
The second book, and pretty out-of-the-ordinary for me, was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I’m not usually one to do a lot of “serious” reading, and this is about as serious as it gets. The first half is Frankl’s autobiography of his time in various German concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, and what he observed about human behavior there (including his own). The second half is an introduction to his own brand of psychiatry, logotherapy, which takes as its basis that most emotional and mental problems stem from a person’s search for meaning in their life — in what they do, who they love, or even how they suffer and die.
It’s fascinating reading, and Frankl earns at least a hearing from his own experiences. Though the latter half occasionally descends into psychobabbly bits, his work, even taken as philosophy vs psychiatry, is worth reading. Recommended.