Tag Archives: Books

A Year in Books/Day 101: A Treasury of Peter Rabbit and Other Stories

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  • Title: A Treasury of Peter Rabbit and Other Stories
  • Author: Beatrix Potter
  • Year Published: No copyright date noted.
  • Year Purchased: The year I turned five.
  • Source: According to the inscription, this was a gift from my Aunt Lauree.
  • About: Every classic Beatrix Potter story is in this volume, including ‘The Tale of Two Bad Mice’*. Maybe it was just me, but I did not like Tom Thumb and his wife, Hunca Munca. I thought they were creepy, but I loved, loved, loved the rest of the book. I loved it so much I even wrote in it (very unlike me). I’ve managed to keep it in my possession for three decades (very like me). Her illustrations are enchantingly timeless.
  • Motivation: I was a girl. I loved animals and, at five, I had already been reading for two years.
  • Times Read: Hundreds during kindergarten alone. I was an obsessive reader even then.
  • Random Excerpt: “The water was all slippy-sloppy in the larder and in the back passage. But Mr. Jeremy liked getting his feet wet; nobody ever scolded him, and he never caught a cold.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10
  • * Having just spent a minute re-reading this story, I stand firmly by my initial assessment: it is scary and horrible and undeniably sad.

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A Year in Books/Day 100: Living Authors

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  • Title: Living Authors
  • Editor: Dilly Tante
  • Year Published: Original Edition-1931/This Edition-2001 (The H.W. Wilson Company/Bookspan)
  • Year Purchased: 2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: Since I spend so much time writing about dead writers, this is one of the most-used volumes in my personal reference library. Although I don’t remember where I bought it, I know that it only cost about $5; practically speaking, it is the best investment I have ever made in a book! ‘Living Authors’ features biographies of pretty much every still-breathing writer (400 of them!) of any importance at the time of initial publication (1931), which means that it covers the years that I most frequently focus on in my own writing. Each entry also has a detailed bibliography. For those of you wondering why I don’t just head over to Wikipedia/other informative web-site, I’ll stop you right there. It’s not the same! Dilly Tante filled his book with strange data and odd minutia, often provided by the authors themselves. It’s simply more interesting and fulfilling.
  • Motivation: I’m always excited to find reference materials contemporaneous to the subjects I write about.
  • Times Read: Cover-to-cover-1/As reference-countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page vi: “In themselves these facts are trivial and meaningless. If they concerned the man in the brown hat next door or the discreet lady across the way, they might be dismissed as idle gossip, both inexcusable and dull. But in the world of art, where talent is primarily a consolidation of personality, we have a right to be curious. Our desire to know the artist is matched by his desire to reveal himself, for the art of the modern world is fundamentally autobiographical, and Goethe, described by Spengler as “the man who forgot nothing, the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single great confession,” may well stand as the type of the Western artist.”
  • Happiness Scale: Off the charts!
My copy of 'Living Authors' Edited by Dilly Tante

My copy of 'Living Authors' Edited by Dilly Tante: I'll award 2 bragging points for every writer you can name!

 

A Year in Books/Day 99: PUNK 365

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  • Title: PUNK 365
  • Author: Holly George-Warren/Foreword by Richard Hell
  • Year Published: 2007 (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: 2010
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: There’s one intense, arresting image for every day of the year. From the legendary to the obscure, the best and brightest, wildest and strangest punk rockers have been time-captured by a long list of great rock photographers. George-Warren’s brief but illuminating text accompanies each photo.
  • Motivation: I’m a punk girl to my soul.
    Siouxsie Sioux at the Edinburgh Tiffany's, 1980

    Siouxsie Sioux at the Edinburgh Tiffany's, 1980 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    I could spend pages waxing eloquently about how Joe, Siouxsie, Ari, Poly, Richard, Lydia and Exene (and so many others) have affected my life, my outlook, my feminism, my humanity, my creativity.

  • Times Read: Countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page
  • Happiness Scale: Off the charts!!

A Year in Books/Day 98: The Writer’s Home Companion

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  • Title: The Writer’s Home Companion An Anthology of the World’s Best Writing Advice, from Keats to Kunitz
  • Edited and with an Introduction by: Joan Bolker, E D. D.
  • Year Published: 1997 (An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company)
  • Year Purchased: 2001/2002
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: I revere books, both for what they contain and for what they symbolize. As a result, I can count on the fingers of one hand how many books I have ever highlighted passages in or written notes in the margin of, including textbooks. ‘The Writer’s Home Companion’ is one of the exceptions. Why? It contains so much stellar, spot-on advice for writers by writers. The kind of advice that you will actually heed and apply. The kind of advice that you probably already know, deep-down, but keep pushing away because that is the easy thing to do. The kind of advice that is at once remedial and advanced, that simultaneously disciplines and frees. The kind of advice that we all need to remember as we go about the task and joy that is writing.
  • Motivation: Who could resist practical advice by the likes of John Keats, Bernard Shaw, Ursula Le Guin and Natalie Goldberg all in the same volume? Not this girl.
  • Times Read: Countless
  • Random Excerpt/Page xi: “Writing is a solitary sport, but none of us can do it without good company at crucial moments. Most of the writers I’ve known are pulled and tugged between their wish for the quiet aloneness necessary for their work, and their longings for human connections. We write both to express ourselves and to be heard by others, but first we have to learn how to tolerate ourselves as we work at our writing. The authors of the pieces collected here share honestly, and often humorously, their thoughts and feelings about writing and the writer’s life, and can provide you with the good company you need to get on with your own work.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10

A Year in Books/Day 97: The Dictionary of Disagreeable English

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  • Title: The Dictionary of Disagreeable English A Curmudgeon’s Compendium of Excruciatingly Correct Grammar
  • Author: Robert Hartwell Fiske
  • Year Published: 2005 (Writer’s Digest Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2005
  • Source: Writer’s Digest Book Club
  • About: I love this book. I know what you are thinking! “I know how to spell. I do not confuse or misuse words.” Neither do I. Even if your English is already agreeable, it is a great reference tool. It reminds you that linguistic sloppiness is never okay. It’s also an interesting study in how language is casually and unknowingly degraded on a daily basis.
  • Motivation: We’ve covered this one before: I think reference books are sexy.
  • Times Read: 3 or 4 or 70. I don’t know!
  • Random Excerpt/Page 342: “20. guesstimate. Use estimate, for crying out loud! It’s the same word!”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 96: Marilyn Mon Amour

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  • Title: Marilyn Mon Amour The Private Album of Andre de Dienes, her preferred photographer
  • Author: Andre de Dienes
  • Year Published: 1985 (St. Martin’s Press)
  • Year Purchased: 1991
  • Source: I bought this book in high school. I remember the mall (City Center) and who I was with (my mom and her best friend Debbie) but I cannot recall the name of the book store!
  • About: However slight the connection, men just love to claim that they had an affair with Marilyn. Usually in book form. Fancy that. It’s almost a sub-category of the cottage industry that is the Marilyn biography. And they were never simply lusty flings or misbegotten one-night-stands. They were all, pretty much to a man, life-altering, planet-shifting Love Affairs. According to the gents in question, that is. The reality must be very different. Out of all of these claimants, Transylvania-born photographer de Dienes stands out as one of the most believable. The hundreds of photographs he shot of Marilyn between the years 1945-1953 testify to the fact that they had a viable working relationship; there’s obviously a sense of trust and friendship between photographer and subject. Since I don’t want to turn this from a review into a treatise, we’ll leave the veracity of his story for another day and another form. Instead, we’ll hone in on the real focus of his book: the photographs. What photographs they are! The majority date from the earliest days of her modeling career; they are undoubtedly the best pre-stardom images ever taken of her. They’re lovely. That’s right. Lovely. No big, loftily descriptive words are necessary, not when one word is so wholly perfect and concise. Her wardrobe of all-American basics (she was broke and had to supply her own clothes for the road-trip shoot of 1945) remain fresh and alluring; they set off her glowing, innocent beauty without detraction. This is the definitive Marilyn Monroe book.
  • Motivation: I was a teenage girl, studying acting. This play world was extremely compelling to me at that time.
  • Times Read: Countless
  • Random Excerpt: “I was impatient to train the camera on her, to choose the right light to set off her skin and her hair, to capture her expression, to make her move, run, stand still, arch her back, stretch. I wanted to catch hold of whatever it was I sensed lay behind that candid smile, those blonde curls and the pink sweater. In one fell swoop I was intrigued, moved and attracted by her.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10+++

A Year in Books/Day 95: John Sloan Painter and Rebel

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  • Title: John Sloan Painter and Rebel
  • Author: John Loughery
  • Year Published: 1995 (Henry Holt and Company, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: 2001-2003
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: Even though I’ve worked in galleries on and off for years, I had never heard of John Sloan before I bought this book; he’s now one of my favourite twentieth century painters AND iconoclasts. Although he is considered a founder and leading light of the “Ash Can” school of painting, it is a term and categorization that he disliked. Loughery’s biography is almost a twin study-that of its avowed subject and the New York City that he called home for decades. This now-vanished world was peopled by an inspiring cast of real-life eccentrics (Robert Henri, John Butler Yeats, Sloan’s wife Dolly). The result? It almost reads like a novel.
  • Motivation: I’m such a sucker for a good biography, even (especially?) someone I have never heard of or know little about.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 273: “He wanted no budding academic painters in his class, but neither was he sparing of those students who didn’t worry about technique because of some natural facility. Facility struck him as dangerous. Anything that mattered should come hard, should require thought and labor. To one student whose drawings seemed effortless, Sloan suggested that he use his left hand or, failing that, his feet. Resist anything that comes too easily, he warned. Resist an empty show.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9
    Yeats at Petitpas (1910) by John French Sloan ...

    Yeats at Petitpas (1910) by John French Sloan oil on canvas, Corcoran Gallery of Art (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 94: 1900

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  • Title: 1900
  • Author: Rebecca West
  • Year Published: 1982 (Crescent Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2000-20002
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: I just realized that this is the second book with the title ‘1900’ that I have profiled this year. They both set out to chronicle the massive changes that brought the Victorian Era gasping and screaming into the modern world. While the goal is essentially the same, the methodology is jarringly different. The clear victor in the battle, if a battle it be, is the sublime Rebecca West. She, of course, had the same advantage as the writers compiled in the later volume-that  of living through the time and world that she wrote about (although she waited eight decades to do so). As an eight year old, she may not have understood things on an intellectual level but she had a child’s intuitive emotions; she experienced the excitement and unease that comes with the changing of the centuries. Her edge is the result of two things: of living long enough to have perspective and, as the sole writer of her book, a cohesion of intent and style. The 90-year-old Rebecca covers a wide swath of historical territory-arts, literature, science, psychology, music and politics-while maintaining clear-eyed yet evocative prose. The photographs spread throughout are stunning and add considerably to the book’s appeal.
  • Motivation: Repeat after me, “Rebecca West.” The turn of the twentieth century is also one of my favourite periods for literature, fashion, activism, plays and music.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 129: “My father guessed that the designer had probably been a man no longer young, impressed in his childhood by the sort of lectures which were given in mid-Victorian days at working men’s clubs such as the Mechanics’ Institutes. It was possible. The chiton and the amphora and the tag from Epictetus exemplified a curious tendency manifested by many of the new proletariat, which felt herself ill done and wanted a larger share of the best. They craved to be accepted in all the institutions which served the upper classes, though they did not think much of the upper classes.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10 1/2

Shopping for the Bookworm: Mystic Moose Book Bags

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Since I usually schlep around half a dozen books on my petite person, not to mention all manner of writing paraphernalia, I cannot have too many tote bags (or, that’s what I tell  myself whenever I whip out my debit card to add another to my collection). I buy them like some people buy socks or lip balm, which is to say frequently.  Continue reading →

Diversions-7 April 2012

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Here are some recent discoveries from around the ‘net. They are not all literary based but they are still compelling.

  • Few things in life beat the sensory joy-fest of clutching a book in your palms. But my love for the written word is too large to be contained by inky pages alone; I’m greedy, I want to read all of the words in the world! This voraciousness has forced me to accept technology in all of its modern mediums, from a Nook to downloadable PDF books. I still buy way too many physical volumes, as curling up with a glowing and buzzing machine is a huge atmospheric mood killer. However, since so many classics are free, it’s painless to give them a test-run before buying a real-life copy. I don’t do that as much as I should because I am a really compulsive book shopper; wandering through aisles between stacked books makes me absurdly happy. But there are times when I appreciate the chance to read something for free without hoofing it to the library. Finding a free downloadable PDF of Alan Watts’ ‘On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are’ is definitely one of those times. I’ve never gotten around to reading this volume-until now. You can find it here.
  • Sal at Already Pretty has a thoughtful, well-mannered piece about defying cultural expectations about dressing as we ladies get older. I’m an extremist and fierce individualist with authority issues, so I am not about to turn into a pearl-wringing, neutral-wearing forty-something when the time comes. Although she doesn’t take the discussion as far as I think it needs to go, it’s nice to see it discussed at all.
  • The lovely Gala Darling gives detailed pointers about how to have an at-home retreat. Yes, please.
  • Vintage hand-painted suitcase by bluebernice

    Vintage hand-painted suitcase by bluebernice

    Would it be a bit odd for me to pack a suitcase for that at-home retreat? If I had this one, I definitely would!

  • Marc Wavra is a fantastic Cincinnati-based photographer-artist. I’ve been crushing on his colourful images for a few months now.

    Mt. Adams Steps by Marc Wavra

    Mt. Adams Steps by Marc Wavra

  • I came across this scrumptious Grilled Portobello and Peach Burgers recipe by Green Kitchen Stories on Design Sponge just in time for grilling season. I want it in my belly now! The photographs are guaranteed to make your jaw drop and mouth water.