Essays, thoughts, jottings, poems and musings . . . about anything & everything library and book related!
Visit the BPL Pinterest page for more book title suggestions!
~~~~~
February 6, 2013
Overdue Library Book In New York Returned 55 Years Late With $100
02/05/13 11:13 PM ET EST 
NEW YORK — A long overdue book has finally been returned to the New York Public Library – 55 years late.
The Daily News ( ) says the biography of a 16th-century priest called
"Fire of Francis Xavier" was checked out of the Fort Washington branch
in upper Manhattan on April 10, 1958.
Library manager Jennifer Zarr tells the newspaper the book
arrived at the library on Monday wrapped in a plain brown envelope with a
check for $100 to cover the dues inside.
She says library records don't go back to 1958 and there's no way to
trace who borrowed the book. She won't reveal the name on the check.
Information from: Daily News, http://www.nydailynews.com
~~~~~
January 14, 2013
Soon you’ll be able to go to CVS and print a book
By Laura Hazard Owen
Sep. 13, 2012
On Demand Books, the
company behind the Espresso Book Machine, and Kodak are partnering to
add print-on-demand technology to Kodak Picture Kiosks. That means
consumers will be able to print paperback photo books, self-published
books and the seven million backlist and public domain titles in On
Demand’s catalog from retail chains such as CVS.
On Demand also announced a partnership with ReaderLink, which
distributes books to grocery stores, drugstores, mass market and club
stores, to make more titles available through the Kodak Picture Kiosks.
“We envision an integrated solution that can substantially redefine
the publishing industry and bring exciting new solutions to customers,”
said On Demand CEO Dane Neller in the release.
There are 105,000 Kodak Picture Kiosks globally; you can find them in
chains like CVS as well as photography stores, pharmacies and other
retail outlets. The partnership with On Demand launches in the U.S. this
year and will expand internationally in 2013.
On Demand Books was founded by former Random House editorial director
Jason Epstein; Neller, the former CEO of Dean & DeLuca; and Thor
Sigvaldason, a former technology consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers,
in 2003. The company already has a partnership with Xerox that has
placed Espresso Book Machines in about 70 bookstores and libraries
globally, but the Kodak partnership will expand its footprint
substantially.
~~~~~December 3, 2012
Revisiting True Grit by Charles Portis
Some novels revisited are a sad disappointment - they were “of their
time” and not made of immutable, everlasting stuff. Or, your priorities
have changed and what seemed significant then no longer seems so now.
Yet there are novels, not classics in the way of the War and Peace or Sense and Sensibility,
still, strong-hewed enough to last. These are well worth a revisit. In
so doing there is the additional reward of having had the sense to
suspect they were good then as well, and experiencing the palimpsest of
the first read richly underlying the second. Such a novel is True Grit by Charles Portis, first published in 1968 as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post.
What makes this book a keeper is the voice of its narrator, 14 year
old Mattie Ross. It is important that Mattie has an exciting, morally
complex story to tell us - about her quest to seek retribution for the
murder of her father. Better, she tells it just as someone of her age,
education and distinctly above average intelligence would tell it, in that particular place and moment in history.
Her tone is waspish and old-maidish, vulnerable and young, driven and
sensitive. Mattie’s personality is replete with the contradictions
lesser writers can’t muster in a portrait. Her voice is strong,
straightforward and shoots language like a gun-slinger. Once you’ve
re-read the book, perhaps you’ll enjoy taking a look at the new Coen
Brothers film version of True Grit - then comparing that with the classic movie version of True Grit starring John Wayne.
~~~~~November 6, 2012
Visiting Tom by Michael Perry
Being a Midwestern Baby Boomer and a sentimentalist regarding the
“old ways”, author Michael Perry is a man I recognize. Perry grieves the
old-style agricultural way of being that is fading out with the aging
of people like Tom of Visiting Tom. Tom
Hartwig and wife Arlene are valued by Perry, because they have managed
to sustain that way of life with wit, generosity and honor. Even in the
face of a major highway built in the 60’s, land taken by eminent domain,
bisecting the farm; Tom and Arlene carried on and dealt with the
storming reality of the modern world rushing endlessly by, a few feet
behind their silo. There is an urgency in Michael Perry’s visits that
shows he is aware that the depth and value of their skills and shared
vision is likely to end when their generation does. That do-it-yourself,
cobble something together, welding and sawing, woodworking and
machining world of the working farmer. The kind of “see it though
anyhow” grit and grace that makes it all possible. In the farm’s heyday
there were crops to get in, cows to tend and preserves to set by for
winter. By the time of the author’s visits, these unrelenting tasks have
gone by - leaving Tom with all of his skills and mastery intact - his
barn stuffed with tools, as well as the dozens working machines he’s
created over the years. Some are extremely practical, like his homemade
saw mill - others Tom created just for the pleasure of making and using
them, case in point, his various working cannons. One of these is set up
so that any visitor has to pass it, muzzle pointing toward him, as he
travels up the long driveway to Tom’s house. Michael Perry is on the
hunt for skills, searching for what it meant to be a man in the old
non-consumer way of the world. Creative, self-sufficient, hardy, secure
in one’s self. You can’t miss those qualities in Tom Hartwig, so it is
good that Michael Perry shared his ‘visits with Tom’ with all of us.
Lauri Burke~~~~~
October 30, 2012
I loved reading Doris Lessing, Nadine
Gordimer, Magaret Atwood and other great writers of feminist literature
who began to enlighten and engage us in the latter half of the twentieth
century. They often wrote from a slight remove - South Africa, England,
Canada - and captured something of the the reality of women’s lives in a
deeply lyric, yet often disturbing way. Some say all great literature
is transgressive - and perhaps it needs to be to hit us so hard and ask
so much of our understanding.
I thought I had come to the end of those
writers and their achingly clear vision until a friend recommended
Kerstin Ekman’s brilliant and subversive tetrarchy The Women and the Town. This
series of novels was written in the 1970’s and early 80’s at a time
when the writers listed above were making their most profound impact on
readers.
The Women and the Town (Kvinnorna och staden):
Witches’ Rings (Häxringarna, 1974), translated by Linda Schenck, 1997
The Spring (Springkällan, 1976), translated by Linda Schenck, 1999
Angel House (Änglahuset, 1979), translated by Sarah G. Death, 2002
A City of Light (En stad av ljus, 1983), translated by Linda Schenck, 2003
Ekman’s fictional history begins in the 19th
century in a remote Swedish village newly bisected by a railroad line.
She pursues her story as the village evolves into a town, then a small
city. As readers, we view the town as it is affected by the Great
Depression, World War II and on into the post war era of the 1970’s.
Through Ekman’s eyes, we see businesses rise and fall, along with the
buildings that house them; see mechanical innovations change the nature
of work and the social order. Yet, most importantly, we are privy to the
city of women; witnessing their complex relationships to one another
over generations. These relationships are sometimes deeply
contentious, yet ultimately supportive. This community of women is
sustained through backbreaking communal work and the need to support one
another economically and emotionally in hard times. It is carried on in
the back gardens of every house on every street in fair weather, and
around the kitchen table in all seasons of the year, fueled by coffee.
Through Ekman’s continuous story of the women, we become able to see, as
she does, the almost tangible “city of light” that rises up on their
efforts in counterpoint to the busily industrializing city of men.
Translations are superb - especially the work of Sarah Death, whose translation of The Angel House is a masterpiece revealing a masterwork with profound clarity.
-Lauri Burke
~~~~~
October 24, 2012
Young People Frequent Libraries, Study Finds
In
a digital world where many younger readers feel increasingly
comfortable downloading novels and textbooks onto their computers or
e-readers, a majority of Americans from the ages of 16 through 29 still
frequent libraries.
According to a study released Monday by the Pew Research Center,
60 percent of Americans surveyed in this age group said they still
visited the library. They use libraries to conduct research, borrow
print, audio and electronic books and, in some cases, read magazines and
newspapers.
That finding would seem to clash with the popular
notion that young readers have turned away from libraries and print
books as the source of their reading material, said Kathryn Zickuhr,
research analyst with the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American
Life Project. “A lot of people think that young people aren’t reading,
they aren’t using libraries,” Ms. Zickuhr said. “That they’re just
turning to Google for everything.”
The Pew Center has been researching the use of the nation’s libraries for more than two years, with financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The latest study involved a telephone survey, conducted last November
and December, of nearly 3,000 people 16 and older talking about their
reading habits, and data from two telephone polls conducted in January.
While young people clearly do not read newspapers as regularly as their
parents and grandparents did, their consumption of magazines is more
closely aligned. The study showed that 40 percent of surveyed Americans
under 30 regularly read newspapers, compared with 62 percent of older
Americans. Seventy-one percent of those under 30 who do read news
regularly said they viewed all of their news through hand-held devices.
While 42 percent of Americans under 30 read magazines, 50 percent of older adults read magazines.
But
in troubling news for tablet makers, the study also found that the
subjects under 30 who read electronically were more likely to read books
on a cellphone or a computer.
In fact, the study found that 41
percent of readers under 30 view books using a cellphone and 55 percent
read from a computer. Only 23 percent of Americans under 30 used an
e-reader and 16 percent used a tablet.
“That’s definitely something we will keep an eye on,” Ms. Zickuhr said.
A version of this article appeared in print on 10/23/2012, on page B8 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Young Americans Frequent Libraries, Pew Study Finds.
~~~~~
May 23, 2012
Writer Carol Shields, who died of cancer in 2003, left numerous literary treasures behind her. She
was born and brought up in the same Chicago suburb as Ernest Hemingway
(Oak Park, Illinois). As a young adult she moved to Canada with her
Canadian husband, and spent the rest of her life there, becoming one of
that country’s most acclaimed fiction writers.
“Canada”, Shields once said, “is a very good
country for writers. We don’t have a long literary tradition. People
aren’t intimidated by the ghosts of Hemingway and Faulkner. We’re not
big on heroes, either. The concept of heroes is alien, and I think
that’s a very telling piece of our national ethos - no one deserves to
be better than anyone else.”
Alex Clarke of The Guardian remarks, “That
final phrase perhaps defines Shields’s fiction - her 10 novels, three
collections each of short stories and poems, several plays, biography
and critical studies - better than any other. She was frequently praised
for her masterful depiction of ordinary lives and for her ability to
present complex and subtle subject material in a deceptively light,
comic manner”.
One of my personal favorites in Shield’s oeuvre is the 1994 novel Happenstance. The
book itself is a delightfully unique artifact - read “her story”, then
turn the book around and upside down to read “his story”. Or, switch the
order if you like. The “he” and “she” featured are two halves of a 20
year marriage. The distaff side of the union is off to an
“art quilt” conference, while dad stays home minding the children. What
occurs during their few days apart is, of course, all “happenstance”. With
Shield’s powerful and subtle writing as our road map, it is fascinating
to go along for the ride and witness what a few quotidian events do to
shape two lives, and one marriage. ~ Lauri Burke
~~~~~
May 4, 2012
I don't know what your childhood was like, but we
didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on
Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was
such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
~ Robert Redford ~
~~~~~
April 6, 2012
I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
~ Charles Kuralt ~
~~~~~
December 15, 2011
I read these two books with total absorption. Each is a time machine capable of conveying the reader back to eras in which newspapers were unchallenged kings of communication; not only investigating and reporting, but often instigating the “news” they printed.
In The Murder of the Century, a male torso found wrapped in oilcloth, floating near a pier, ignites the missing person case that leads to a duel between newspapermen William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (the former, owner of The New York Journal, the latter, of the New York World).
As parts of the so-called “scattered Dutchman” start to show up around the greater NYC area, the chase is on, with Hearst’s “Murder Squad” doing their own detective work - while reporters from both papers jump in to stimulate the news they then print in gargantuan type. Thought by many to be “the birth of the tabloids”, the frantic coverage of this case is brought thrillingly to life by author Paul Collins, who, in the process, reanimates for our view a Gilded Age NYC in equal parts hauntingly familiar and passing strange.
Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City jumps us ahead into the Jazz Age, whose modernity stops a few miles short of equality for women and minorities. In that bygone era, if you were a woman on trial for murder in Chicago, an all-male jury could hang you, or let you go, often based on nothing more than your looks and social status. As an example, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two attractive, fairly upscale women, both of whom murdered their boyfriends in booze-soaked blackouts, were each given a pass, while less attractive and more “ethnic” women in prison with them were doomed to hang for their crimes.
Beulah Annan
Belva Gaertner
Maurine’s perceptive analysis of the legal situation in Chicago started the ball rolling on general public awareness that women were needed to serve on juries, so that their sisters could get trials based less on personal pulchritude, and more on the facts related to their crimes.
Like The Murder of the Century, The Girls of Murder City takes the reader back to a long-lost social scene that bears a resemblance to our own, yet seems oddly distorted to modern sensibilities.
What is certainly true is that, in the passionately human world of each book, newspapers were predominant; their owners and reporters holding tight to a lever with which they could move the world.
~~~~~
~~~~~
October 5, 2011
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
~ Groucho Marx ~
~~~~~
~ Robert Redford ~
~~~~~
April 6, 2012
I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
~ Charles Kuralt ~
~~~~~
March 26, 2012
Book Club Members Looking for a Book?
Are you are Book Club Member on the lookout for discussion titles for your group? Try this Source—
Here you’ll find some of the most requested Random House Titles of 2012 - each title comes with its own reading guide —
Some categories the site lists include:
MOST REQUESTED - New Favorites
MOST REQUESTED - Ongoing Favorites
MOST REQUESTED - Enduring Favorites
Top 50 Titles
~~~~~
December 15, 2011
Crimes of the Century…
Newspapers and Crime -
Two Highly Recommended Nonfiction Titles:
The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars - AND -
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago
I read these two books with total absorption. Each is a time machine capable of conveying the reader back to eras in which newspapers were unchallenged kings of communication; not only investigating and reporting, but often instigating the “news” they printed.
In The Murder of the Century, a male torso found wrapped in oilcloth, floating near a pier, ignites the missing person case that leads to a duel between newspapermen William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (the former, owner of The New York Journal, the latter, of the New York World).
As parts of the so-called “scattered Dutchman” start to show up around the greater NYC area, the chase is on, with Hearst’s “Murder Squad” doing their own detective work - while reporters from both papers jump in to stimulate the news they then print in gargantuan type. Thought by many to be “the birth of the tabloids”, the frantic coverage of this case is brought thrillingly to life by author Paul Collins, who, in the process, reanimates for our view a Gilded Age NYC in equal parts hauntingly familiar and passing strange.
Douglas Perry’s The Girls of Murder City jumps us ahead into the Jazz Age, whose modernity stops a few miles short of equality for women and minorities. In that bygone era, if you were a woman on trial for murder in Chicago, an all-male jury could hang you, or let you go, often based on nothing more than your looks and social status. As an example, Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two attractive, fairly upscale women, both of whom murdered their boyfriends in booze-soaked blackouts, were each given a pass, while less attractive and more “ethnic” women in prison with them were doomed to hang for their crimes.
Belva Gaertner
Maurine Watkins
Maurine Watkins, girl reporter with the Chicago Tribune, was perhaps the most comely, and certainly the most observant and analytical of the three main female characters in this book. A petite, shy young southerner, Watkins talked her way on to the Chicago Tribune Staff, then backed up her talk by “walking the walk” of a hard-nosed crime reporter. Her unique view point led to a series of articles on the “beautiful killers” that she later, as a burgeoning playwright at Yale, turned into the play Chicago.
Maurine’s perceptive analysis of the legal situation in Chicago started the ball rolling on general public awareness that women were needed to serve on juries, so that their sisters could get trials based less on personal pulchritude, and more on the facts related to their crimes.
Like The Murder of the Century, The Girls of Murder City takes the reader back to a long-lost social scene that bears a resemblance to our own, yet seems oddly distorted to modern sensibilities.
What is certainly true is that, in the passionately human world of each book, newspapers were predominant; their owners and reporters holding tight to a lever with which they could move the world.
November 21, 2011
Epistolary Novels - How Can They Be So Good?
I’ve always had a yen to read Clarissa by Samuel Richardson - saw it referred to in another book recently and so took up what I presumed would be “the task” over the weekend. Instead, I found myself so deeply enveloped (pun intended) in this novel of letters, that I could hardly put it down to come to work today.
Published in 1748, well before the Empire Period when Jane Austen and her ilk put pen to paper, this novel struts and roars its way through a more direct, openly bawdy and primitive time in English life. Without trains, villages were truly remote - swords carried on the street by Bravos - powdered wigs and ruffles worn by the upper classes gave a false sense of gentility to a society hardly civil. Everywhere people were expected to dress to their station, laws prohibiting those of the lower orders wearing certain cuts of clothing and styling of fabric and headdress. Cities were traps for the unwary and unprotected of the fairer sex. Capture and rape sometimes not an unforgivable crime, if marriage were to follow.
Fealty was owed to parents in a way almost unimaginable today - as if each family were a fiefdom and its children, especially underage daughters, vassals. Affection could do much to soften these rigid lines, but once traduced, shackles symbolic and actual could be applied to any familial sinner of tender age. A fate no neighbor or outsider could easily step in and redress.
Thus, to understand Clarissa, we must understand the world she inhabits. For the educated young woman of good family, safety was to be found only in obedience - yet education is always a threat to the tyrannical system, for it can act to lift the scholar, male or female, above the cant of strictly received wisdom and on into independent thought, even drastic action.
Such is the plight of, as some call her, “genius” Clarissa, a girl in her late teens who writes like an angel and reasons like a judge, but bears the fatal flaw of an childhood so loving and unopposed that she thinks the best of everyone and fears no evil. Still, evil comes upon her in the form of attractive rake Robert Lovelace, a debauched libertine who proposes in his dark heart and mind a plan to tear Clarissa away from her family and ruin her, then continue to share her bed, eschewing the marriage bond.
Clarissa is an inveterate letter writer, but, it seems in this novel, so are all the literate and even semi-literate in this time and place. Scribbling away for all they are worth - couriers making last minute dashes cross the countryside to deliver epistles large and small, inked and penciled, on rough paper and smooth. And what letters!!!! They are stashed under hen houses to be retrieved, copied for friends so the correspondence entire can be analyzed by all. A galloping, gripping plot is given in them in breathless pace.
Will the scheming rake despoil virtue as incarnated by angelic Clarissa? Can her best friend save her? Her family come to her rescue? You must read Clarissa to find out, and, since you won’t be able to stop until you learn her ultimate fate, make sure and give yourself plenty of time to read all nine “volumes” in one go!
For dessert - please enjoy Lady Susan, an epistolary bonbon of the highest order written by Jane Austen early in her career. Its subject? A deliciously unscrupulous coquette who enjoys toying with the affections of several men at one time.
Female and male rakes Lady Susan and Robert Lovelace don’t share the same novel or moment in time, but do make a fascinating pair of miscreants to follow with interest and, of course, all due readerly censure.
~~~~~
October 5, 2011
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
~ Groucho Marx ~
| Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz is available via the Ocean State Libraries Catalog. Check it out today! |
~~~~~
June 27, 2011
An excerpt from Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron
"In our society, people believe you have to do something to be recognized, by which we mean something "in your face," and preferably caught on camera. Dewey wasn't like that. He didn't perform spectacular feats. There was nobody pushing him to success. We didn't want him to be anything more than the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa. And that's all he wanted, too. Dewey wasn't special because he did something extraordinary but because he was extraordinary. He was like those seemingly ordinary people who, once you get to know them, stand out from a crowd. They are the ones who never miss a day of work, who never complain, who never ask for more than their share. They are those rare librarians, car salesmen, and waitresses who provide excellent service on principle, who go beyond the job because they have a passion for the job. They know what they are meant to do in life and they do it exceptionally well. Maybe that's the answer. He [Dewey] found his place. His passion, his purpose, was to make that place, no matter how small and out of the way it may have seemed, a better place for everyone." (pp. 207-208)
~~~~~
May 21, 2011
A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life. Henry Ward Beecher
~~~~~
April 5, 2011
Gadgets You Should Get Rid of (or Not)
BOOKS - Keep them (with one exception). Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries. -by Sam Grobart, March 23, 2011, NY Times.
March 27, 2011
A snapshot of what our group is all about was beautifully expressed by two group members - a mixing of minds and words to form this single quote: “When we scan another life by immersing ourselves in engaging books, both fiction and nonfiction, we come away with a different perspective regarding our own lives… to read involves a mixing of minds between author and reader.”
~~~~~
March 7, 2011
A Lively Discussion . . .
~~~~~
February 7, 2011
[Click article image to zoom in on text for easier reading]
December 7, 2010
On Keeping a Reading Diary
~ Essay by Lauri Burke ~
My visionary friend Louise Blalock often asks people she cares about to give her a baby picture of themselves, and to describe a “lost book” from their childhood. “Everyone has one”, she’d say, “that wonderful book whose story you remember but whose title and author are lost to time. You’d give anything to find it again but the way to it is lost.”
Like most people, I have one. It is a story about a girl growing up on an island off the coast of Maine. The narrative moves out from her early childhood like the ever-expanding circles that form when a stone is dropped into a pond. Her baby years are spent in the meadow grass of her home, white-winged sea gulls overhead. Later she moves to a bigger island to go to elementary school, then to the mainland for high school. But the story is less about school than it is about summer in Maine and a girl growing up in vividly beautiful environment, in a protected time and place.
I can see it all now, the world captured in that “lost book”. How the summer people cast their seasonal spell, and a small sailboat is a wind-whipped bridge between here and there. The girl’s hair is blonde and 1950’s cropped, her shorts, sneakers and striped
t-shirts the essence of summer. The jagged rocks glitter black in the spray, the tiny beaches are tide-wracked with seaweed and foam.
But the identity of the book itself? Who knows? I never wrote it down. It was one of a thousand books that formed the fabric of my summers back then, hauled in piles from the public library, pilfered from the shelves of aunts, uncles, grandparents while on vacation in Minnesota, bought in the scholastic book program at school and then given away. How was I to know that years later I might want to name that book, retrieve it, live one more time in its sunlit, summer world? Or, maybe hand it to a young friend to read from some second hand bookstore or library shelf?
As I emerged from my childhood and teens and moved on into my twenties I began to realize that the “lost book” is not just a problem of youth. All prolific readers who use libraries as their major source of reading material bump into this dilemma sooner or later. If the book is no longer on your shelf at home, it is all too easy to draw a resounding blank in response to that classic question, “read any good books lately?” The issue was only heightened for me by my choice of work, a major component of which has always been to offer good books to readers.
In my twenties I decided to begin keeping a record of the books I read, so that none would ever be “lost” to me again. I figured that this “reading diary” would not only give me a source for my readers’ advisory work, but would also serve as a record of who I was when I read those books. I knew the format I employed would have to be very simple and casual or I would become trapped in the snares of my own perfectionism and wouldn’t bother to keep it up.
The reading diary recipe I came up with called for a notebook of any shape or size, preferably one filled with lined paper. Each brief entry would begin with the day’s date, followed by the author and title of the book read. Beneath that heading I would write a brief description of the work, coupled with my response to it. Proper spelling and punctuation were to be thrown to the winds.
From the beginning the diary was a resounding success. Not only could I answer the “what have you read lately?” query with aplomb, but I could, and did, cull titles from my reading diary for special booklists, like “Quality Women’s Fiction” and “Memoirs”. As time went by I enjoyed comparing my responses to books read over time, and reread a generation apart.
I have now kept a reading diary for over thirty years, and it has become an album of memories, a kind of long running self-portrait in books. Looking at batches of books read during crisis or to prepare for a pregnancy now bring a smile of recognition and remembrance. I’ve never liked looking at photos of myself, but every ten years or so it is really fun to look at the snapshots of my reading life that the diary provides me.
In the past year I have begun to keep my reading diary on a computer hard drive rather than in a ratty, spiral-bound notebook. It is convenient to be able to copy parts of it into e-mail correspondence and onto booklists. Yet whatever form it takes, the diary is, at base, a candid, tattered and heartfelt document. One you can use as a portrait, a map, a keepsake or a love letter to literature, just as you please.
November 18, 2010
Make thy books thy companions. Let thy cases and shelves be thy pleasure grounds and gardens.
~ Judah ibn-Tibbon (12th century) ~
~ Judah ibn-Tibbon (12th century) ~
~~~~~
~~~~~
Overheard at the October 4th gathering:
" I've received so many great ideas
just from this one meeting! "
" I've received so many great ideas
just from this one meeting! "
~~~~~
September 23, 2010
The richest person in the world - in fact all the riches in the world -
couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot
available at your local library.
~ Malcolm Forbes ~
~~~~~
~~~~~