Hey,
One of my biggest struggles has been finding English books. I've even been borrowing them from the local high school kids, who get popular fiction for vocabulary improvement and English book reports. I've recently found a treasure trove of books. An old woman who lives is the woods, a traveller who spent her young years in Washington DC, and has finally settled down with a French female lover. She likes to have me over because she hasn't spoken English with great command in over 10 years. We drink peppermint tea and watch the fish swimming in her pond. Every time I leave I hold a stack of books. They are eclectic collections, rarely fitting one I would pull of the shelf of a library, but I've found a bit of inspiration in all of them.

I was recently loaned "All the Days and Nights" the collected stories of William Maxwell. After opening the crisp cover, the closest I've gotten to an actual new book in a long while. I read the preface, and thought it was something I needed to share. No one is the house has enough of a command of English or love of the written work to appreciate it, nor at they at a time where they struggle for material and fluidity that I personally blame on lack of experience. I hope you enjoy this:

"...I had started to become and English teacher and changed my mind, and I had written a novel, as yet unpublished. I meant to go to sea, so that I would have something to write about. And because I was under the impression, gathered from the dust-jacket copy of various best-sellers, that it was something a writer did before he settled down and devoted his life to writing.....(The captain) had no idea when the beautiful tall-masted ship would leave its berth. And I had no idea that three quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life-characters -- affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbours white and black-- that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered. The Natural History of home, the suede glove on the front hall table, the unfinished game of solitaire, the oriole's nest suspended from the tip of the outermost branch of the elm tree, dandelions in the grass. All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognise instinctively what would make a story or sustain the complicated cross weaving of longer fiction..."