Favorite Books
Little, Big (John Crowley), Beloved (Morrison), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Silver Crown (Robert C. O'Brien), The Lord of the Rings, Surfacing (Atwood), The Realms of Gold (Drabble), Possession (Byatt), Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume, short stories of Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz; I,Vampire (Jody Scott), The Book of Night With Moon (Diane Duane), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie), The Enchantress of Florence (Rushdie), Blue Highways, Siddhartha (Hesse), Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather), De Profundis (Wilde), journals and memoirs of May Sarton, 84 Charing Cross Road (Hanff), The Televisionary Oracle (Rob Brezsny), The "Company" novels by Kage Baker, A Wrinkle in Time, The Empty Space (Peter Brook), The End of the Novel of Love (Vivian Gornick), The Writing of Fiction (Edith Wharton), Aspects of the Novel (Forster), Network (screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky), Hamlet, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear.
What I'm Reading
The Coroner's Lunch (Colin Cotterill.
Favorite Authors
John Crowley, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, Kage Baker, Harlan Ellison, Elizabeth Bear, Diane Duane, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, John Mortimer, Isabel Allende, Mark Salzman, Chogyam Trungpa, Pema Chodron, Robert Thurman, David Sedaris. To me, "favorite" means I will pick up one of their books and flip through it to decide if I want to read it, no questions asked, on the strength of the name alone. Whenever I have decided to read everything one author has written, I wind up disappointed and bored with them. Best to keep an index of paramours, rather than endure serial monogamy.
Influences
See Favorite Authors. Special attention must be paid to Harlan Ellison and Tom Robbins, as well as Mad magazine, Monty Python, the soundtrack music of Mission:Impossible, James Bond movies, the songs of Tom Lehrer, Laugh-In, and being born with a name I hated but had to wait nearly 30 years to change to one that is correct and perfect. Two years of Paratheatrical Laboratory work with Antero Alli (www.paratheatrical.com), which taught me how to actually experience what I am experiencing, know that I am experiencing it, take responsibility for the arising of that experience, and interact with others who are in the same state of awareness whether I know anything superficial about them or not. Buddhism, especially from the Tibetan Lineages. The Ganges River -- reaching it, standing in it, dipping myself three times in it.
Joy Shayne Laughter’s Bookmarks
About Joy Shayne
Fourth-generation Hoosier, but in love with the whole world, and trying to see as much of it as possible; just found a small independent publisher for my first novel; two and a half decades as a freelance journalist and essayist; fifteen years learning...
Causes Joy Shayne Laughter Supports
WFHB Community Radio, The Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center, The Lakota Language Consortium, Sakya Monastery of Tibetan Buddhism, Seeds of...
Joy Shayne’s Favorite Books
Little, Big (John Crowley), Beloved (Morrison), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Silver Crown (Robert C. O'Brien), The Lord of the Rings, Surfacing (...