Welcome to Litsy!

Nonbinary British writer Olivia Laing‘s experience of renovating a garden in Suffolk is entwined with an exploration of the role of gardens in history & in particular their connection with sociopolitical issues. The role of gardens in the lives of queer folk during a time when it wasn‘t good to be gay, the therapeutic effect of gardens to this day, the lush botanical language: there‘s so much that I love about this book! #LGBTQ

Sameness was anathema to William Morris. What he liked was individuality amidst common purpose, each person as distinctive as flowers in a meadow.

The study of botany was an exercise in looking. It made the ordinary world more intricate and finely detailed, as if I had acquired a magnifying glass that trebled the eye‘s capacity.

There‘s no point looking for Eden on a map. It‘s a dream that is carried in the heart: a fertile garden, time and space enough for all of us.

Morris thought everyone‘s environment could be & should be more beautiful. He believed it was people‘s right to live in beautiful, unspoilt, unpolluted places & he thought, like Ruskin, that beauty was not a luxury & that luxurious & unnecessary things were actually unbeautiful, since beauty was so closely aligned to necessity & nature.

What makes a garden such an important constituent of a utopia? It is neither a farm nor a wilderness, though it can push up hard against either of these extremes. This means it betokens more than just utility, encompassing beauty, pleasure & delight, while remaining emphatically a site of labour as well as leisure, a place to please puritans & sybarites alike.

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But Eden also served as a justification, a God-given excuse note for the brutal work. In the seventeenth century, arguments for colonial expansion regularly drew on Genesis, and God's injunction to man to subdue and have dominion over all creation; an attitude, I might add, that is directly responsible for the perilous state of our planet now.

On paper, I should have loved this. I listened to the audiobook which I found uninspiring and flat. The tone made it difficult to engage with, even though I was interested in the topic: Laing is restoring a garden in Suffolk which she uses as a point to explore the ways humans have created “paradises” over the years. Gardens exist for the wealthy through slave labor. What‘s the impact of this? This gets lots of praise, so I should have gone print.

We thoroughly enjoyed our annual lobster roll end of summer celebration yesterday. Cool breezes, sunshine, blue sky - perfect weather to sit by the sea. A stop for ice cream in Madison demanded a visit to Indie bookstore RJJulia‘s.As I have a book buying ban, I limited myself to 2 books- 🤫 #endofsummer #familycelebration

The staycation is over. Actually it ended on Monday when I had my first workday at 3 weeks of vacation.

So how did my reading go?

I finished my current reads, A Flat Place & Caledonian Road. I kept up with my buddy reads Nancy Drew, Shardlake , Sherlock Holmes and started Unwell Women #SheSaid

From my stacks I read the ones with dots next to them.
So 8 of 19 that I owns and 5 of 10 library books, so in total 13 books

Right before the pandemic, Laing and her husband buy a house w a garden. Laing want to restore the garden to its previous glory. As she is doing that, she‘s looking into how the garden has been seen as a paradise. But what will stay with the most after reading this is Laing‘s look into how the owners of the big estates with big gardens acquired their land, but also how they got the money to make these amazing gardens.

#BookReport

I finished Dissolution #ShardlakeBR and Real Estate

I read West, On the Calculation of Volume. III and My Friends

Which means that my only current read at the moment is The Garden Against Time

#WeeklyForecast

Hopefully I‘ll finish Dissolution #ShardlakeBR

Just started The Garden Against Time and want to continue that

I‘ve also just started Real Estate and want to finish that. I also want to read West and On Calculation of Volume III

I also want to get a good start on My Friends

My staycation started after work today. So I found all the books I want to read

I own the books on the left and that‘s 19 books
On the right are my prioritized library books and that‘s 10 books. I currently has 23 books out

So for 23 days off work, I got 29 books, needless to say I won‘t get to everyone

This doesn‘t include my current reads (A Flat Place & Caledonian Road) or buddy reads (Nancy Drew, Shardlake & Sherlock Holmes)

My Birthday book booty.

https://lithub.com/olivia-laing-on-the-care-and-keeping-of-gardens-in-an-era-of-...

I‘ve had the bookiest birthday in years! Here‘s the rest of my birthday book hall.

Second Star is meditations on lingering, observing and noticing…

I haven‘t quite worked out what the Garden Against Time is yet, but it‘s very beautiful (with endpaper 🥰)and is blurbed by Nigel Slater and Neil Tennant. Which seems random?

And Manny has been on my radar, and just looks cool.