Happy Ballard Day everyone! It seems every year we celebrate this holiday, the world has become more Ballardian. This year’s (hopefully) going to be hard to beat, with the scientific community announcing the dawn of the Anthropocene, a 24 hour news cycle that makes it nigh on impossible to discern fact from fiction, and a reality TV star becoming President of the USA.
As part of our music-themed month on the blog, we’ve been asking our authors to talk us through four songs that have in some way shaped their writing. Andy Miller is as mad about music as he is about books, and could easily have written The Year of Listening Dangerously. After much agonizing, he managed to whittle down his vast record collection to the foursome below:
What journey is more important than the one that we take in our own minds? Maybe the commute to work, sure, but when you’re somehow squashed up against seven people AND you have a pole in your back but are still managing to read a book, these are the stories that transport us to the minds of others; the minds that are being transported. HOW VERY META.
THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY is Andy Miller’s inspirational and very funny account of a year-long expedition through all the books he always wanted to read but couldn’t find the time. To mark the paperback release of the book today, Andy has kindly given us a behind-the-pages look at how his resolution to read brilliant books resulted in a brilliant book being written.
The 4th Estate Literary Salon is back! Come and hear Damian Barr, Alexandra Heminsley and Andy Miller discuss the matter of memoir writing.
