Bookshelf Love

Cozy but not enough natural light . . . 

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Great light AND great chair . . .

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You could pack a lot of books on this nifty corner shelf. 

The orange and dark grey color scheme is pretty cool too.

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All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.
~Penelope Lively

Thankful Thursday

Another TT post inspired by blogger Ruby Bastille . . .

What I am thankful for this week:

1. Pedestrian Friendly Towns - I appreciate that I can walk to most places from my house.

2. The Great Lakes - The breeze off the water provides all natural air-conditioning for everyone within about a kilometer of the shore.

3. Chocolate - A little something chocolate is a delicious and satisfying way to end a meal.

4. Libraries - Please-oh-please don't let these wonderful little oases of quiet and books and thought die out for the sake of online-streaming-ebook-socialmedia-convenience-connectivity etc etc etc.

5. Rain - There was a brief downpour yesterday that made everything a little greener.

book joy

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The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.
~Yoshida Kenko

This Side of Paradise - More Quotes

Gosh, I like Fitzgerald's writing. Here are a few more noteworthy passages that never made it on to last week's post. And you know what's refreshing? His backstories are brief and to-the-point. When a new character is introduced, we get a straightforward paragraph with some facts and flair to get a sense of personality, and that's it. No long and rambling irrelevant explanations about eevvrythiiing to do with said person. This first passage from page 215 should be used as a template for all authors - it's snappy and interesting and a delight to read.

They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her history. The Ramilly's were two: old Mr Ramilly and his granddaughter, Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amory imagined to have been very much like his own, on whose death she had gone to Baltimore first to stay with a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a debutante at the age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in the country in March, having quarreled frantically with all her Baltimore relatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd had come out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor with an esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocents still redolent of St Timothy's and Farmington, into paths of Bohemian naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That's as far as her story went; she told the rest herself, but that was later. (pg215)

Now he realized the truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. It's very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high  and dry forever on an island of despair. (pg230)

Q. - What would be the test of corruption?

A. - Becoming really insincere - calling myself 'not such a bad fellow', thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again. (pg240)

by Samuel Michlap

Monday Reading Notes

I had this idea that I would buckle down and do some serious TBR reading over the summer starting, like, yesterday. I have a fantastic little library full of great titles picked up at book sales over the past year that are all calling out to me AND I CAN'T DECIDE which one to get busy with next. I even pulled out a little mini pile of Really-Want-To-Read-Next titles so that I'm not distracted by ALL THE REST OF THEM. But! I paused too long to start a new one and, now, to make matters more complicated, my bargain book sale compulsion recently led me to acquire a thing like . . . 

 

which, obvs, must be read RIGHT NOW because the cover is delightfully, intriguingly trashy and the inside jacket has this for a teaser: Mary remains true only to the three rules she learned on the streets of [1760s] London: Never give up your liberty. Clothes make the woman. Clothes are the greatest lie ever told. I made the mistake of reading the prologue and first couple of pages rather than putting it directly on the bottom of my TBR pile for later - and now I'm hopelessly hooked. I was so sure I was ready for something a little more modern after being immersed in The Serpent's Tale, but no. Fictional or non, the lure of books about gutsy historical women is just too great. 

by Winslow Homer

Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.
~David Almond

by Cheryl Ratcliff

The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin

Another fun (albeit sometimes gruesome) historical, fictional mystery set in medieval England. I listened to this on audio just as I did with the fist book in this series The Mistress of the Art of Death. I was glad to see the same characters here teamed up again to investigate the poisoning of King Henry's favorite mistress Rosamond Clifford. But this story was a little heavier on the politics of the time than Mistress was, which for me isn't as enjoyable. I much prefer to hear about the details of every-day life in the twelfth century than I do about military alliances and whatnot. It was more interesting, instead, to follow Adelia's analytical thinking and common-sense as she used the tools at hand to solve the murders without giving herself away as a doctor, a punishable crime for a woman in her day. That alone makes a great story! Grave Goods is the next book in the series and I'll probably be throwing that on my iPod sometime soon to finish off the trilogy.

In twelfth-century England, Only one woman is trained to uncover the secrets of the dead. The mistress of King Henry II has been poisoned -  and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the king's estranged wife, is the prime suspect. The king must once again summon Adelia Aguilar, mistress of the art of death, to uncover the truth. But more is at stake than just the identity of a killer: civil war threatens to ravage an already war-sick England. Joining forces with her former lover Rowly Picot, Adelia investigates the death as more savage killings ensue. Isolated and trapped by snow and cold, Adelia works feverishly to save innocents and protect the peace. (back cover)

I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I'd found him - not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates.
~Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip

Library Girl

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

As a coming-of-age story, this is one of the best. I so thoroughly enjoyed This Side of Paradise it makes me think I need to get busy reading everything else FSF wrote, *especially* since the general gist of reviewers seems to be that this is one of his lesser and more juvenile works. Certainly it has a youthful feel to it but many of protagonist Amory's follies result in insights that are surprisingly mature. I love Fitzgerald's writing and the odd, experimental layout, which is funny coming from me who just finished complaining of another book being 'written' in clippings and excerpts, but oh well. His writing here jumps from short story to prose to poetry to screenplay and back again, which in the context of the characters and their youthful capriciousness works really, really well.  I included some of my favorite quotes -as usual- but have so many more I'll have to put them in another post.

One of the most brilliant first novels in the history of American literature, This Side of Paradise launched F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary career. Published in 1920 when the author was just twenty-three, it is about the education of a youth, and to this universal story Fitzgerald brought the promise of everything that was new in the vigorous, restless America of the years following World War 1. Amory Blaine - egoistic, versatile, callow, and imaginative - inhabits a book that is interwoven with songs, poems, playscripts, questions and answers. His growth from self-absorption to sexual awareness and personhood is described with a continuous improvisatory energy and delight. Far from being distracting, Fitzgerald's formal inventiveness and verve only heighten our sense that the world being described is our own modern world. (back cover)

Amory marked himself a fortunate youth, capable of infinite expansion for good or evil. He did not consider himself a 'strong char 'cter', but relied on his facility (learn things sorta quick) and his superior mentality (read lotta deep books). He was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or scientific genius. From no other heights was he debarred. pg19

Then tragedy's emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back to Princeton about twelve o'clock in two machines. It had been a gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented. pg83

Then at six they arrived at the Borges' summer place on Long Island, and Amory rushed upstairs to change into his dinner coat. As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked at himself in the mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will. There was little in his life now that he would have changed. . . Oxford might have been a bigger field. pg87

. . . but you're developing. This has given you time to think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned - we'd just make asses of ourselves. pg100

There are books for when you're bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you're calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you're sad. And then there are books for when you're happy. There are books for when you're thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you're desperate. . . 
~Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives