25 posts tagged “books”
If you're feeling in need of an antidote to the 'painful lives' section of bookshops, David Hepworth has found it:
Fantastic. I am fully on board, and thinking of heading off to Waterstones with a label-maker.
Great column from Justine Picardie about one of my favourite books. Her description would surely make anyone want to read it?
There are many good reasons to read Dodie Smith’s “I Capture The Castle”: it provides excellent advice about dressing on a budget (dye all your clothes sea-green); how to cope when the man you love falls for your older sister (keep a diary) and your stepmother dances naked in the rain (ditto)."
I've been reading The Night Bookmobile every Saturday in the Guardian but, as I'm going through a particularly dim patch, hadn't twigged that it was online. Brilliant.
Update: Hmmph. I have slightly gone off this now, as I can only find the most recent two on the site. But... as I said, it could just be the dimness.
Bookish things that I noted during my blogging holiday.
A resounding recommendation for How Fiction Works. Now on my ever-growing list of things to read asap.
Thirty creative bookshelf designs. All fabulous, but not quite as fabulous as the bookcase stairs. (via Jessamyn)
Jessa asking us to please keep our memoirs to ourselves. Damn. Now the world will never come to know the story of a clumsy girl from Yorkshire who battled bravely against her inability to correctly learn the alphabet.
And finally, the one that made me cry - Jessa's selection of a passage about jackdaws from Wildwood. If the post made me cry then how on earth am I going to cope with the book?
There isn't much point in me getting excited/sniffing disapprovingly about the Amazon Kindle, because it isn't for sale in the UK. I'm still very interested of course, but must admit my first thoughts were:
i) Can you use it to prop up a wonky table?
ii) What happens if you drop it in the bath?
If the answers are No, and It breaks, then it doesn't do everything a book can. So I had great fun reading Steven Poole's proposed minimal list of ebook features, particularly:
7 It will display to other people in coffee shops and on public transport the title of what I am reading, so as to advertise my erudition or quirky sense of humour.
8 It will be physically handsome, not drop-dead fugly. (Note to Amazon: for pity’s sake, next time, head-hunt people from Sony or Apple.)
Thanks to Kathryn Hughes I now know that the British Library is offering tours of its Centre for Conservation - book hospital! Sign me up.
For the 500th post on their blog, Emma at Snowbooks has written the story of how they came to be... fascinating stuff, beautifully written.
Nope, me neither. But Brian Dettmer has...
Is it art? Is it vandalism? Is it a librarian-scaring slasher flick? (OK, OK, so it's art).
(via Snowbooks)
How a person arranges their books is a complicated thing, and people get surprisingly het up about it. If you don't believe me, just ask Callie.
Having already been highly impressed by Sandra's beautiful new room, I was then greatly entertained by her account of how she organised her books into their new home. She really had me when she described a dilemma I also have:
Of course the ideal plan fell apart the moment I perched on the top of my step ladder with the first armful of fiction. I could not bring myself to include the contemporary unread fiction (and goodness knows there's plenty of it) with the stuff I really have read.
But it clearly all worked out in the end.
Fascinating piece in last Saturday's Guardian Review discussing the booming business of 'nostalgia-lit', as represented by The Dangerous Book for Boys and now The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls. Jenny Turner suggests that these are "what the publishing trade calls "gift books", for people who don't much enjoy reading to present to people they don't really know or like." She continues:
It's important, though, to understand that there isn't, and never was, any such thing as a 70s childhood, really - it was always fantastical and composite, for parents in the 70s had nostalgia too, and so on, back and back. In the 70s, I remember longing to be a child of the 50s - a longing I picked up from my parents, though they were wartime children. Except that our version of the 50s was about the 30s, too: "The years between the wars are generally regarded as a golden period by those who lived through them", as the Igguldens write, evocatively but nonsensically. "The Boy's Own Paper gives an idea of the attitudes of the day, valuing attributes of manliness, fair play, decency, honour and an ability to play cricket . . ." No Nazis, then, no Great Depression. Just as the 50s was a time of absolutely no drugs or sex.
