Not exactly "festive" reading!
Ruthiella To balance out the good cheer! 😜😂 3h
CSeydel Ooh it sounds good! 29m
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Not exactly "festive" reading!
[It's] Les Misérables, it was taken off the market, I managed to get a few copies before they shredded them...
What's it about?"
"A man who, out of starvation, steals a loaf of bread and is hounded by the police for the rest of his life. SAVAK thinks the book might miror some things in our society."
I put it in my scholbag and headed home....
How strange that in our culture books were considered dangerous...
Visit to a beautiful bookshop in #Chorley
Bonus: a 3 piece band playing Xmas songs. Upstairs there was a wreath making class. Got started on the Xmas presents.
https://www.ebbandflobookshop.co.uk/
Even in the seemingly endless terror of middle school...
When the final report of the Commission of investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was published in 2020 it caused an outcry, because of its assessment that those who bore the greatest responsibility for the horror and cruelty experienced by so many women and their children were not officials of the Catholic Church and the state, but the women's families instead.
She [Clair's mother] has built her sense of herself through these stories and at this stage - she's over ninety... questions aren't helpful. I ask them anyway, my sceptical, disenchanting questions. I go further and I actually check facts... Sometimes I come back to her with evidence that proves that what she remembers or what she heard can't have happened that way. She is never pleased about this. Yet she keeps feeding me stories.
pickHonest account of breast cancer treatment on the NHS, with humour but still pretty brutal. The author was 37 when diagnosed.
They used to meet here outside the Konsum when they came home from work, from the cooperative or the fields. They used to drink beer and talk, sometimes they drank beer and didn't talk, before they went back to their farms and into their houses. Fred, Wee Henry, Walfried, Jochen Schuster and Jochen Meyer - all long gone now or dead.
He wants to remember their faces and their voices...
"Yeah, that's how to do it, Duffy," I said to myself. Maybe my last case, like Poirot's would be the one where the bloody detective did it.
"What are you thinking, Sean?" Crabbie asked.
"Heat death of the universe, entropy, decay, the utter pointlessness of police work."
"The usual then?"
"Aye."
Before I discard my past I'll write it down...
We couldn't provide any services, since there was hardly any social housing left and a million people were on the waiting list, but we could increase the paper trail...
It had been the logic of bureaucracy since time immemorial...The Pharaohs... only undertook vast, pointless construction projects like the Pyramids of Giza in order to keep the populace busy during flood season....
to make sure they didn't start asking existential questions
The protagonist wants to find out more about the French colonial past...
#GN #InTranslation
Feels like commentary on the scoreline... Poor 🏴
pick
I love books about books - this is a fascinating, anecdotal wander through histories of collectors, libraries and ideas.
As early as 1806 the traveller John Lambert noticed... [NYC] bookshops were 'numerous' and that a lot of people seemed to be reading in coffee shops. Two early characters were Emanuel Conegliano, one of Mozart's librettists, who ran a specialist Italian bookstore so compendious that Columbia University bought [it and] ...William Gowans, parts of whose shop, with its piles of books up to ten feet high, had to be navigated with sperm-oil lamps.
Martha Nussbaum argued... Western concern with cleanliness is ' a refusal to... be contaminated by a potent reminder of one's own mortality and animality'.
.....The Finnish philosopher Olli Lagerspetz takes comfort from the idea that hygiene can be suspect:
As a sometimes negligent householder... I am naturally soothed by the idea that exaggerated cleanliness is not next to godliness but to fascism and xenophobia.
Mark O'Connell of the New Yorker likes the idea that 'a nicely sharpened HB' can be so powerful, and is funny about it:
"I tend to slot mine behind my right ear, carpenter style; I like to think this lends a somewhat rough-and-ready aspect to my appearance as I sit reading Middlemarch on the bus home.
Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again.
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress....
However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.
pickIf you couldn't already guess from my litsy spam, I loved this graphic novel. About a young man moving to New York to explore his dream of dancing on Broadway. Wonderful illustrations.
"I have had my dream-like others-
And it has come to nothing so that
I remain now carelessly
With feet planted on the ground,
And look up at the sky-
Feeling my clothes about me,
The weight of my body in my shoes,
The rim of my hat, air passing in and out
At my nose-and decide to dream no more."
"Thursday" by William Carlos Williams
Beautifully illustrated GN: this is a wordless depiction of one character's trauma.
Kerouac's inspiring tips for life...
[And I realised no matter what you do, it's bound to be a waste of time..]
Loved the way the author used these line drawings as chapter breaks.
I really liked how this biography of Mary included the wider political context: Mary as figurehead for political protests.
King Henry (VIII) attempts to censor public criticism...
This way of collecting books for their look, rather than content, is a perennial cul-de-sac of collecting, observed by Seneca of scroll collectors in Roman times: 'Many use books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining room! [Some] get their pleasure merely from bindings and labels.'
Image Abbey Library of St. Gallen via https://www.1000libraries.com/post/2025-top-10-most-beautiful-libraries-in-the-w...
pickWonderful look at language communities in New York.
Recommended!
Argh! I thought I had another chapter to go of the book I was *actually reading* but no, an "exclusive extract"...
'You're a tick boxes kinda guy,' his wife used to say. And according to one of his annual performance reviews, 'a pedestrian determination' was the 'hallmark' of his 'approach to policing'.
Admin were thinking of bringing in self-assessment; if they did that, Muecke was tempted to write, 'Still standing.'
If writing is honey in terms of sweetness, then writing one's own language is ambrosia. If writing is sauce, then writing one's own language is the seasoning [salt]. If reading is work, then reading one's own language is its respite. (Translated [from N'ko] by Coleman Donaldson.)
"The idea of the shtetl was formed by Yiddish literature,' says Boris, "by writers like Peretz and Sholem Aleichem ... living in the big cities." Whether transmuted through a Chagall painting or a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof, the shtetl has come to stand in for the whole vanished world of traditional Jewish life Eastern Europe, shrunk down to the scale of a folklorized village....
With all her languages, Rasmina is almost an unofficial, unpaid interpreter [in Seke]...
"It's what a lot of immigrants go through," she says...
...these things add up. She draws the line when aunties, like aunties everywhere, try to follow their kids onto social media: "The social media is getting to them. They're very addicted now. Every day somebody's mom is like, 'Make me Instagram, make me TikTok,' and I say, 'No thank you!"
There was a great remembering that was also a great forgetting, one hundred years of silence ... of the convicts and Aboriginal people little was ever said. Of a slave system and a genocide nothing. What remained was either silence or lies. Such as: the convicts and their children had all fled to the mainland during the gold rushes. Such as: the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct, long gone...
My father's mother and father...were... illiterate. My father had...a sense of the magic of words that never left him, an awareness that those twenty-six abstract symbols could liberate if you understood them and oppress if you didn't.
He told me the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew, a line I stole and used elsewhere. What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft?
I missed my big sister greatly and the point of the books was to smuggle a message of love to her, and each book, every faux sentence and every scrawled picture of a word was simply saying that one word over and over.
And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.
When I think about this moment, I remember one of my favourite lines from The Simpsons, when Chief Wiggum catches his son Ralph and Bart trying to get into a locked cupboard in his attic: 'What is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?' But if I was to tell you that mere curiosity is what drove me up the esplanade that day, it would be a lie...
The nurse who drew my blood....watches this infected blood flow for days on end, and despite her translucent gloves she passes right next to the source of this poison, she strips off her gloves with a snap to place the bandage on the wound with her bare fingers...
... she says, "Your perfume-it's Habit Rouge, isn't it? I recognized it right away....to catch a whiff of it on this gray morning, well, you know it's really a little treat for me."
Coordinating with my winter reading cardigan!
Excited about an upcoming #JamesBaldwin #100 event
[Robert, Count de Montesquiou] realized that German idea of making your life a work of art: a gesamtkunstwerk.
...he made his upstairs flat over-looking the Seine into 'the mirror of my soul', exotically furnished with japonisme and books. Many of us look around our dwelling and see...a series of shabby compromises, half-loved inherited junk, broken things, lingering IKEA tat ...and does anyone, hand-on-heart, have the curtains they really want?
And I am not resigned, as old Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of Honey's favorites, would say. Lily says to Gazala;
Grief is such a stalwart, sturdy companion, maybe it just wrings the neck of pettiness for us all. Gazala opens her eyes and lifts her head to look right at Lily, She nods.
Oh, leave the pettiness, she says, if you can.
Try.
Shiny new book for the Xmas wishlist!
D'Agoult...returned an hour and a half later....and announced that he had new orders specifying that he arrest councilors Duval d'Éprémesnil and Goislard de Montsabert. At that point, according to several accounts, all the magistrates replied with one voice, "We are all Duval and Goislard. It is all of us you must arrest."
France 1788 #ImSpartacus
.
Note to self: Do not pick up anymore of Percival Everett's back catalogue unless a trusted reviewer recommends. Do not be seduced by shiny reissue covers.
![[tagged book]](https://image.librarything.com/pics/litsy_webpics/icon_taggedBook@3x.png){kind=icon}
