I have been so terrible at blogging lately… seriously, I bet no one ever reads my blog anymore and I would not blame you.
I've read such great books lately and have failed to even review them -- I'm lazy. I'm lazy. My work life drains me of my preferred energies.
But I just started what is turning out to be a real excellent read -- The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides. I so love this author.
Anyhoo -- a passage near the beginning of the book made me think of one of my own literary proclivities. The protagonist Madeleine Hanna is obsessed with books and literature [I love her already]! She comes from an affluent book-loving family, and I dug the following description:
Even as a girl in Prettybrook, Madeleine wandered into the library, with its shelves of books rising higher than she could reach -- newly purchased volumes such as Love Story or Myra Breckinridge that exuded a faintly forbidden air, as well as venerable leather-bound editions of Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens -- and the magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks. She could scan book spines for as long as an hour.
So could I.
That is what I mean to say with this blog tonight. So could I.
In fact, I do it all the time -- I wander in the bookstore. I am WRITING this blog from the bookstore. I find the meandering among book spines not only utterly fascinating, but very relaxing.
I wonder if I'm alone in this. In my opinion, the only thing better than wandering among books is sitting down with one and reading it.
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I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?
-- Ernest Hemingway --
Have a great Thursday!
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Every man waits his destined hour; even the cities are doomed to their fate. Let us spend our leisure with our books, which will take our mind off these troubles, and will teach us to despise what many people desire.
-- Poggio Bracciolini, in a letter to a friend, September, 1430. --
Have a great Tuesday!
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Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of the bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
-- Petrarch --
Have great Monday!
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Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?
-- Yann Martel, Life of Pi --Have a great Friday!
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If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
-- Albert Einstein --
Have a great Thursday!
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To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.
-- Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head --Have a great Wednesday!
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Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to.
-- Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels --
Have a great Tuesday!
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Tonight I finished reading Arthur & George by Julian Barnes.
My verdict? TERRIFIC.
This is an author that definitely deserves a good reading!
I did no research whatsoever before picking this book up, so I had no idea it was of the historical fiction / thriller genre. I did not know it was based on real events and that the "Arthur" of the story is none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.
The novel is uniquely structured, alternating between the entirely separate, seemingly unconnected lives of.. well…. Arthur & George. I've already mentioned who Arthur is -- George is a much lesser known figure, historically speaking.
George Edalji, a vicar's son, is a half-caste [Parsee / Scottish] boy who grows up in a small Staffordshire village. His family becomes victim to a series of malicious and completely unwarranted [perhaps racially motivated] slander. Life for the Edaljis becomes unlivable as they are increasingly maligned by this anonymous letter-writer and prankster. And soon, letters are not all they have to worry about. Someone is maiming animals in the night, slashing away at the bellies of cows and horses, leaving the animals to slowly die. The effect on the community is devastating, because in turn-of-the-century [1900] England, these are not only crimes against livestock, but against livelihoods.
Through what seems to be an explicit smear campaign aided by a less than competent police force, George is accused of the crimes. And convicted.
We, the reader, believe that he in innocent.
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle picks up on the story, he is also convinced of George's innocence -- and sets out to clear George's name, seeking not only for exoneration, but reparation of this wrongful conviction. What follows is a re-telling of how Doyle virtually took on the persona of Sherlock Holmes, and painstakingly, courageously, and brilliantly tracked down the right clues -- finally achieving justice in what was essentially a travesty of the court system of the day.
It reads like a crime novel, but with an elegance and exquisiteness found only in the best of literature. Which is to say, we read not only a great plot, but also examine, in beautiful prose, the baseness and greatness of human nature. Barnes has stuffed all of that into these pages.
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I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.-- Carlos Ruis Zafon,
The Shadow of the Wind --
Have a great Friday!
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The Shape I Gave You
Water looks like what it’s in.
Else it’s flat, and spread too thin.
The shape of you is much the same.
It needs a cup, a house, a frame.
It wasn’t long before I knew
The very curve and slope of you
Belonged in me, to never part
My ever loving, beating heart.
© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008
Have a great Valentine's Day!
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I Know Her
Because across the room I know her.
A glance, just one, tells me we are on the same page.
Once someone spoke badly of her, in my hearing,
and everything within me knew they were mistaken.
She lives in a place that is beyond proving
or improving herself, to me or others.
And I would jump a cliff for her wink.
She derails me. Oh, makes me angry, yes,
now and then, but that is because I am learning
her. Learning me. I have looked at water
thirty feet down, fish oblivious ‘tween boat
and sand. She is clearer than that.
Her laugh ignites every best thing about me,
and when she arrives, I am more happy.
Than I was. Before.
It was not always like this. My life was not always
like this.
Even now, there are times, and they are frequent,
when I feel in a dream. I doubt.
And I believe that none of this should happen
to me.
But that is when I read what I have written above
and know that I am awake, and that across the room,
or across ten time zones,
I know her.
© Ciprianowords Inc. 2008
Have a great Wednesday!
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Have a great Tuesday!
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Life. How easily everyone, including himself, said the word. Life must go on, everyone routinely agreed. And yet how few asked what it was, and why it was, and if it was the only life or the mere amphitheatre to something quite different. Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with… with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.
-- Julian Barnes, Arthut & George --Have a great Monday!*****
My longtime American Reading Partner [a very inclusive, yet moreso exclusive Book Club] sent me two pictures of her daughters' cats. I haven't been given proper legal authorization to use these cats' first or last names, so we will call them Cat A [the orange one] and Cat B [the close up].
Are you a cat person?
I definitely am, as you all know. I am deliberately not allowing Jack [my own cat] access to my computer for the next few days so he doesn't see this posting and become jealous of these two fine specimens here. If either of these cats were up for adoption [and they aren't] -- which would you choose to have?
It would be a difficult decision for me. I think, in the end, Jack would be forced to somehow get along with both of them.
Thank you Alyce, for hosting this terrific Saturday Snapshot blog meme @ At Home With Books.
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Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life -- the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within -- can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
-- George Eliot, Middlemarch --
Have a great Friday!
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"What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?'
'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly.
'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ...
'Finn?'
'"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)"
-- Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending --Have a great Thursday!
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One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter.
-- Henry David Thoreau --
Have a great Wednesday!
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The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
-- Isaac Asimov --
Have a great Tuesday!
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Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
-- David Foster Wallace --
Have a great Monday!
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If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
-- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire --
Have a great Friday!
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