No. 35

My to-read stack is monstrous.  I wrote a little bit about it on the English Muse not too long ago, and yet I've added to it since.  Although I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being and am midway through A Moveable Feast, the list has actually grown in the time I started making my way through it.

This weekend, when I picked up a couple slim (and thrifty!) volumes of poetry, the bookseller recommended that I read Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.  I came home and looked it up, and now it's on my list.  I never did take a contemporary poetry class, though I was briefly enrolled in one before a space opened in a required course later.  Now that I've read the description, I feel I must read it before I read my poetry.

Books are conspiring to take over my life.

Image: The Classics original ink drawing by Kristina Hultcrantz of emmakisstina via Matchbook Mag

No. 32

This week through Memorial Day, Better World Books is donating six books for every three you buy.

If you have yet to get a copy of some of those books on your to-read list, hop over there and take a look!  I used BWB to buy most of my books in college and still pick up a few fun reads from their site nowadays and have always been pretty happy with them, though the shipping is sometimes a little slow.  If you're looking for a new read, I've reviewed a few books that you might love.

No. 29

I finally read The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  Tomorrow, I'm going to write about it on The English Muse, but I can't resist sharing one of my favorite lines from the text.  

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” 

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

No. 20

Happy Friday!

I'm spending the weekend with Unaccustomed Earth, After Dark, and possibly The Hunger Games.  I don't yet know if anything will be life changing, but I wouldn't mind that sort of read one bit.

What are you up to this weekend?  Have a great one!

No. 17

                   

I devoured these two books between Thursday and Sunday.

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories about people who "seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations" (from the description).  I picked it up on my friend Beth's recommendation.  In all the years we've been friends (since third grade!), she's never suggested a book I didn't like.  However, I loved this one.  The stories are poignant, but not in any formulaic way, and you won't easily forget them.  I went to the library and picked up a copy of Unaccustomed Earth to read next, and plan to read Lahiri's novel, The Namesake, as soon as it's available at the library.

I chose Sputnik Sweetheart mainly because I wanted to read 1Q84, but it was already checked out, and no other books by Haruki Murakami were available at my local branch.  This turned out to be a happy accident, because Sputnik Sweetheart was one of those books that you race through, even while it makes you pause and ponder.  However, I feel like I missed some of what was going on--not the events themselves, but their significance, as if some of the story was over my head (and, considering the references to semiotics, it probably was over my head).  Still, it's an incredible book, and I look forward to reading more of Murakami's novels in the future.

So...what have you been reading lately?

No. 13

Samson Greene is found wandering the desert in Nevada, unaware of how he got there and unaware of the cherry-sized tumor in his brain.  When it is removed, he cannot remember twenty-four years of his life.   His wife, Anna, loves him; he does not remember her.  The world of the present bears little resemblance to the last year he remembers--before the Cold War ended, before Elvis died, before his mother died.  He is granted, essentially, a blank mental slate for his adult life, the intellect of a highly educated adult without the prejudices and associations of that intellect.

Man Walks Into a Room is a story of uncovering who we are without the things we've done, finding the self underneath the habits of a lifetime, and the wonder of exploration within the mind, within our lives, and outside into the great world around us.  I won't say that this book amazed and awed me, not in the same emotional way that Krauss' The History of Love did, but Man Walks Into a Room did kindle a constant sense of wonder, one that is still with me a few days after closing the final pages.

No. 8

I don't have either, not quite.  Still, our little apartment looks out on a wooded area, and I my bookshelf is over-filled with books, and it works--especially because there are two bookstores and two public libraries within a ten minute drive.

When we settle into someplace bigger, though, I'll have a library of some sort, even if it's just an extra bookshelf or two in a corner, and I'll definitely have a garden.

The Sweet Life, print of quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero, by shelli dorfe of Studio Mela/dazeychic on Etsy

No. 6

It's National Library Week.  After finally mustering up the courage to pay all my old fines for overdue books (though I couldn't look the woman at the counter in they eye while doing so), I have finally become a regular at the library again.

As much as I love wandering a bookstore, there is something to a stack of library books that gets me, too.  It's sort of like when you buy a used book and realize someone else has read those pages before--maybe smiled on that line, wiped a tear away on this one, and sighed through the final pages.  With a library book, though, you become a piece of the book's story, another reader to turn the pages and pass it along.

No. 3

Postertext compiles the text of books and arranges them on a poster to depict significant or iconic scenes.  Currently, only classics are available, but the line will be expanding soon.  Little Women is currently my favorite.  A Les Misérables poster is in the works, though, and I'm a bit excited to see how it turns out.  Which ones do you like?  What books would you like to hang on your wall?

Clockwise from top: Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan

No. 2

In second grade, a friend and I both raced through every book from Little House in the Big Woods to These Happy Golden Years.  It was a race both because we wanted to be the first to finish the series (competitive reading!) and because we simply couldn't put them down.

I don't know where my old copies are.  They were probably passed along to cousins or friends.  Still, I remember those books and the feel of each in my hands.  They were paperbacks, hand-me-downs, falling apart from multiple readings, and perfect for an eight year old girl who loved everything about "the olden days."

This morning, I found scans of the first edition covers on Purple House Press this morning in one of those click-from-link-to-link adventures.  The recollections were fairly joyful--and it delighted me to see that Purple House Press is in a little town about two hours from where I live.  The Laura Ingalls Wilder page is more of a side project from fifteen years ago--the press is actually devoted to republishing children's books that have gone out of print.