What is your favorite childhood book? Or one book you think everyone should read?

Then I’m totally spent and wander around my house like a zombie for the rest of the day. I can usually write about 1,000 to 2,000 words of useful material in a session. That’s three or four hours of intensive writing: my night-time reading is usually material that’s connected to my writing - my own notes, books or articles that are related to my book project - and so whatever I’m reading sort of percolates in my head overnight, so that when I wake up I’m ready to produce: I sit down and start typing. I get up quite early in the morning-between 5:00 and 5:30, most days - and if I’m working on a book like “An Odyssey,” I’ll shuffle downstairs, make a pot of coffee, and bring it upstairs to my study, where I can usually work for about three to four hours. Whatever I’m reading sort of percolates in my head overnight, so that when I wake up I’m ready to produce: I sit down and start typing. Now I save evenings for reading, note-taking, stuff like that. As I get older I find it harder to work creatively in the evenings, as I used to do when I first started writing for a living back in the early 1990s and was a total night owl.

What is your daily writing routine?Įarly mornings and lots of caffeine. “An Odyssey,” which is part family history and part literary criticism, was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction.īelow, read more writing advice from Mendelsohn, author of “An Odyssey.” He shares the books he thinks deserve more attention, and his daily writing routine: 1. He’s since written nearly a dozen more books across different genres. Mendelsohn’s first book, “The Elusive Embrace,” published in 1999, became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Then, a mentor stepped in, and told him not to wait for the “angel of inspiration” to visit, but instead to just get words down on the page. Like many new authors, he felt blocked, anxious and unsure whether it would be any good. Daniel Mendelsohn, writer, critic, translator, and editor-at-large of the New York Review of Books, struggled with his first book.

An odyssey mendelsohn