Archive for the 'bookish things' Category

Reading Myself To Sleep
Billy Collins

The house is all in darkness except for this corner bedroom
where the lighthouse of a table lamp is guiding
my eyes through the narrow channels of print,

and the only movement in the night is the slight
swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing,
and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand.

Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page

into the first tentative flicker of a dream,
passing out of the bright precincts of attention
like cigarette smoke passing through a window screen?

All late readers know this sinking feeling of falling
into the liquid of sleep and then rising again
to the call of a voice that you are holding in your hands,

as if pulled from the sea back into a boat
where a discussion is raging on some subject or other,
on Patagonia or Thoroughbreds or the nature of war.

Is there a better method of departure by night
than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,
the sole companion who has come to see you off,

to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
I can hear the rush and sweep of fallen leaves outside
where the world lies unconscious, and I can feel myself

dissolving, drifting into a story that will never be written,
letting the book slip to the floor where I will find it
in the morning when I surface, wet and streaked with
daylight.

-from Questions About Angels, poems by Billy Collins

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Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

Nobody knows how many whales were killed during the great age of whaling, but one estimate suggests that about 300,000 were slaughtered in the four decades or so to 1870. That may not seem an especially vast number, but then whale numbers were not vast to begin with. In any case, the hunting was enough to drive many species to the edge of extinction. As whale numbers dwindled, whaling voyages grew longer and longer – up to four years became common and five years not unknown – and whalers were driven to search the loneliest corners of the most distant seas. All this translated into greatly increased costs. By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50 – half an average worker’s weekly wage – yet still the remorseless hunt continued. Many species of whale – possibly all – would have vanished for ever but for a sequence of unlikely events that began in Nova Scotia in 1846 when a man named Abraham Gesner invented what for some time would be the most valuable product on earth.

-From At Home by Bill Bryson, page 129

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Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

I absolutely love bookplates, and looking for them on Etsy is one of my favorite routine “Etsy-checks.”

Today, since it seems like a lovely lazy Sunday afternoon activity, I thought I’d share a few favorites I’ve found lately. I will advise you to proceed with caution though… while compiling this post I bought three different sets. Many bookplates are too cute to consider resisting.

VINTAGE: $15.00 for 30-40, at RetroNorth

HANDMADE: $15.75 for 24 bookplates, blank or personalized, at The Oddest Owl

HANDMADE: $4.00 for 8 bookplates, at adorapop

VINTAGE: $8.00 for 25 bookplates, at Vintageworks

HANDMADE: $15.00 for custom Rubber Stamp, at AsspocketProductions

HANDMADE: $6.00 for 10 bookplates, at phoebe1

VINTAGE: $19.00 for 25 bookplates, at finiHome

VINTAGE: $16.00 for 30 bookplates, at mushroom and moss vintage

VINTAGE: $3.50 for 4 bookplates, from cOveTableCuriOsitIEs

I’m pleased to announce that the winner of the Packing for Mars giveaway is Maria!

Congrats! I hope everyone who reads this book enjoys it as much as I did.

What kind of woman has a saffron quilt on her bed? Wears a white linen dressing gown? Keeps beside her bed a stack of gardening books? Stores all her clothes in a shabby antique wardrobe, with a mirror built into its door? Who is she when she is in this room, alone and unobserved, and in what way does that differ from the person she is when she is in a restaurant with friends or in rehearsal or engaging with members of the public? Who, in short, is Molly Fox?

From Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden, pages 8-9

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Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva and Marg that encourages readers to share the goodies that they picked up at their libraries each week!

I got many treats at the library yesterday – mainly due to their recently expanded Graphic Novels section, which made me incredibly happy to discover.

From top to bottom:

Circle of Friends DVD (Starring Chris O’Donnell and Minnie Driver) – Recommended to me by a friend, a must watch in prep/excitement for my trip to Ireland.

Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson – a graphic Travel Journal by the author of one of my favorite graphic novels, Blankets.

Someone Will Be With You Shortly by Lisa Kogan – Impulse grab, short memoir that looks endearing and funny.

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden – This is the only book that I actually planned on looking for and checking out. It’s included in Barnes and Noble’s summer Discover New Authors selection, and captured my interest.

The Beats: A Graphic History edited by Paul Buhle – A good find in newly expanded Graphic Novels section.

Pride & Prejudice (graphic novel) adapted by Nancy Butler – Another good find in the Graphic Novels section.

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes – Spotted this and realized it didn’t make sense that I haven’t read it, given how much I enjoy Graphic Novels.

Since a lot of these are graphic novels*, and the ones that aren’t are fairly short, I’m hoping to read (and watch, in the case of the DVD) all of these before they’re due – something that is rarely possible with most of the stacks I bring home from the library.

*I think this post now holds the record for the number of times I’ve mentioned graphic novels in one blog post. I’ll add it to the tags just to be sure. :)

To figure out how best to prevent motion sickness, you first need to figure out how best to bring it on. Aerospace research has excelled at the latter, if not the former, and perhaps nowhere more triumphantly than at the U.S. Naval Aerospace Medical Institute in Pensacola, Florida: the birthplace of the human disorientation device. In a 1962 NASA-funded study, twenty cadets agreed to be harnessed to a chair mounted on its side on a horizontal pole. Thus affixed, the men were rotated, rotisserie style, at up to thirty revolutions per minute. As a reference point, a chicken on a motorized spit typically turns at five revolutions per minute. Only eight of the twenty made it to the end of the experiment.

From Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach, page 108

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Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

In 1943, when Ireland was officially in Emergency mode, an American B-17 Flying Fortress en route from Marrakesh to England got lost and went off course. Almost out of fuel, the crew of the T’ain’t-a-Bird made a forced, unscheduled landing in White’s Marsh, outside Clonakilty. Looking out, the crew of ten thought they were in Norway, until curious locals started arriving on bicycles and enlightened them. By all accounts, they were giving a sustained and rousing welcome. Interned in O’Donovan’s Hotel in Clonakilty, the crew made merry while efforts were made to build a makeshift runway.

A Secret Map of Ireland by Rosita Boland, page 59

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Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

All immediate hints of purpose went out of the rooms themselves. Showers in kitchens, toilets in living rooms, sinks in bedrooms. It was as if Picasso were born a slumlord instead of a painter. Nothing was where you thought it would be, which would be eccentric in a mansion but was disarming in an apartment. Once, at a party, I opened a door expecting to find a toilet but found a stove instead. Just a closet with a stove in it. And a bare bulb hanging, as if to say, “Here is where we roast the children.”

-(On NYC college grad first apartments) from How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley. (page 44)

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Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)

When she was not looking for her name, she was writing it, and not just Charlotte either as she would have put on her books at home, or even at the little village school where she went before. Charlotte alone proved no identity at all. Charlotte Mary Makepeace she wrote in full and in her best handwriting on each of the different-colored exercise books given to her. Besides the satisfaction of writing her name so carefully, it seemed also curiously comforting to prove emphatically over and over again that she was still  Charlotte Makepeace just as she had been yesterday at home. For since this morning she had felt herself to be so many different people, and half of them she did not recognize.

-Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

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Teaser Tuesdays is a fun weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. I change the rules a little bit to suit my own purposes: I hand pick the teaser, rather than choose one randomly. I also very frequently post more than two sentences. :)