When the pages of books fall in fiery scraps...

.....
Part of a longer poem looking at some very dark times in Polish history.

Young reader, you won't live inside a rose.
That country has its planets, its rivers,
But it is as frail as the edge of the morning.
It's we who create it every day anew,
By respecting as real many more things
Than are frozen between a noun and its sound.
We wrest them into the world by force.
If got too easily, they don't exist at all.
So, farewell, things gone. Your echo calls us,
But we need to speak gracelessly and roughly.

...a Mexican, Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-95).... Her grandfather loved books, and in his house she taught herself to read and write Latin before she was five. Greek followed soon afterwards and as an adolescent she learned Aztec... she collected books and continued to educate herself....

Reading, she argued, should be a habit shared among women... 'we can perfectly well philosophize whilst cooking dinner'.

... the great Persian scholar al-Sahib ibn Abbad (d. 995). The Emir of Persia offered him the plum job of running the empire's most important province, Khorasan, but he declined on the grounds that it would take 400 camels to move his personal library.

...he encouraged the establishment of state libraries in Qom, Isfahan and Tehran, the latter containing 200,000 books.

The young man seemed ill at ease. 'Is there something wrong?'
Mm well... yes, in fact his library books.'
'What?'
"Well, he must have had two out, he always did....'
.....

Even a murder doesn't let him off those overdue fees??

Androids are taking over, everyone is tracked by devices they "choose" to wear and surrounded by adverts. I'm halfway through, and it's very creepy. Partly because it feels close enough to RL to be possible.

Waah!!! How did i not know this existed?

There had been some turnover among the Newbury Street Irregulars since we'd come west. Some of them had gone west as well... But computers kept getting faster, cheaper, and more interesting, and the Irregulars didn't lack for members....it was so crowded some nights that there was talk of closing off membership and starting a waiting list. The diehards hated this idea, because they had spent their whole lives being picked last for sports teams...

Nope.

#Booker2025

'It's okay,' she says. "There's no point talking about these things without honesty. About anything.'
He points out that quite a few of the pictures seem almost pornographic.
'That's true, she says.
She seems to think for a minute, and then she says, 'Most of the things here are either devotional objects, or more or less pornographic, or social trophies, or some combination of those things.

I can't decide if reading this with rugby in the background that I don't want to watch is a good fit with this title...

(I am today's find-the-streamer monitor, apparently. We're on #3 already... 🤔😱 )

The owner of the winery takes the people who work in the warehouse and the office to see them doing it - he says he wants them to be aware of what actually happens on the land. The day they go up there the workers are burning the pruned stems in piles on the grass at the sides. The white smoke rises into the air. The sun shines through the rising smoke. There's the scent of the smoke and the quiet crackle of the burning stems.

#Booker2025

They are lighting lamps there now at four o'clock, and with their high, narrow windows black against the sky, their sanded flags lit by pools of flaring gas-light, their cells dim, the women in them hunched, like goblins, over their sewing or their coir, the wards seem more terrible and more antique.

/Image via Museum of London

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation/longlist2025/

The judges said of the 2025 longlist:
“....the longlist... showcases the extraordinary range and depth of global women‘s writing now available to readers in English. The inclusive scope of this prize means that it crosses borders not just language and space but of time as well... Our longlist travels from Argentina to South Korea, from Haiti to Romania, from Sweden to Slovenia.”

In New York City, for example, only thirty-one enslaved people were manumitted during the entire eighteenth century..... more than eight thousand enslaved black people [were] living in the city during this time.

On a le droit...

I love these chap books. So much temptation...

https://www.strangers.press/product-page/kanata-full-set
#Japan #InTranslation #StrangersPress

Every time the authors connect Jane's life to her fiction, they use much brighter, eye-catching colour. Here a visit to a stately home (might have) inspired Northanger Abbey.

Bio includes 🐣 from TV / movie adaptations too.
I got this one at least... (Colin Firth forever)

#Austen
#Pemberlittens

#10beforetheend

My back is not cooperating this weekend so painkillers, blanket and book it is.

Such a fascinating glimpse into parliament, politics and what it was like to be an early woman MP c. 1930s

(The murder mystery is a bit ho hum).

"But, sir, I've often wondered why more people don't get murdered in this place when you think of the opportunities."

Photo: detail of a painting I took a long time ago visiting the H of P. Is that Gordon Brown?

The policeman on duty at the door....explained with a grin that the Home Secretary's League of Women Voters had arrived en masse to be shown round and given tea. The Minister had escaped after assuring them how glad he was to see them, how delighted Mr West would be to show them everything, and how terribly disappointed he was that a Cabinet meeting prevented him from having that great joy himself.

He was angry that the Minister should have agreed to see Annette Oissel alone, an unprecedented action. No Minister ever sees any visitor without an official nurse in attendance. It is recorded that a recent Home Secretary, after laying down office, remarked to his wife, "How nice to be able to talk to you, my dear, without having the minutes taken by a secretary."

‐‐-----
Ah, those pre WhatsApp group times...

[Cardinal] Rohan believed that Cagliostro exercised occult power: he could cure disease, transform metal into gold, and see into the future. When asked... whether he had any regrets about the life he had led, he replied that he still felt terrible about the assassination of Pompey...
....
"The Affair of tbe Diamond Necklace" - reads like fiction, unsurprisingly the talk of Paris in 1785.

Very cute and amusing collection of minimalist cartoons...

(Google translate: Have you noticed how we always hear the teacher of class 305 say "shh"?)

Yes, even in our class we hear her)

The bookshelves for Creature Comforts...
(At a Wallace & Gromit exhibition)

https://theharris.org.uk/product/wallace-gromit-in-a-case-at-the-museum-exhibiti...

Since nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e., nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what'll happen at work, I'd love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buy a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then end my short life in a bloody murder.

The internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn't really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad.

... she's, like, way the hell downtown, in Chinatown, and she really should go back to work. Opportunity number two for an odyssey of city exploration as a metaphor for self exploration: poof, down the tube. Whatever. She does have this feeling for a moment though of what it would be like not to be tied to Steph, to their apartment, to her job, but then she thinks: that's some straight dude bull-shit, the self-sufficient loner.

"She only goes after people who are really terrible..."

This book is set in 2010. The author and the interviewer reminisced. I felt old. Unlikely to buy...

This is just a terrifying subject.

#10beforetheend

Starting with Kris Manjapra, as NF generally takes me longer (and if I finish before the end of October, it does double duty for another challenge!)

@ChaoticMissAdventures

Going to take @ChaoticMissAdventures prompt and read these books on my shelves before the end of the year. Some have been there longer than others! Wish me luck...

#10beforetheend

When someone else is enthusiastic about a book:

But you have read it recently and are just "meh"....?

https://static.nytimes.com/email-content/BK_sample.html?action=click&module=nl-i...

But the colonists were too stubborn to accept his invitation.

What the Believers had suspected all along, that the whites were beyond redemption, was confirmed. What else would one expect from people who were a product of a different creation from that of the amaXhosa, people who were so unscrupulous that they killed the son of their own god?

(Photo taken waiting for the Sarah Hall event to start...)

Sat in the second row and was so star struck forgot to take a photo. So articulate and interesting to listen to.

More events coming up: Norwich, London, Kendal, Newcastle...
https://www.sarahhallauthor.com/events https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/events/helm-sarah-hall/

Portrait of the original author in the back of the book.

Fascinating re-imagining of a late 19/ early 20th century novel about class and gender inequalities in a northern (English) town dominated by one industry.

Afterword explains what Holdsworth was trying to do and how, like many successful women writers, she has been written out of lit history.

I'm out of work and I don't intend to find any... until I've got through Marx.
............

Well the reading bit I id with, not so much Marx after a painful attempt for a history course many years ago.

Eh Rachel!

Mme du Barry continued to be the favorite target of libellers... A scurrilous biography, Anecdotes secrètes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry, traced her career from the brothel to the royal bed...It became a top best seller in the underground book trade of the 1770s...

...
Royal gossip clearly not new.
Image from "her" webpage.
http://www.madamedepompadour.com/_eng_pomp/home.htm

There's no nibbling in covert operations!

‐-------
Not even in Paris?
Another good reason for avoiding MI5...🤣

Finally finished this chunkster! I usually get a bit itchy at any book over 300 pages, but the #Booker2025 shortlist made me pick it up (thank you, my library system).

Some great moments, but mostly I felt disconnected from the young titular characters. Think for me a book centring Pooja or Mama's story/ies would be more interesting. Acknowledging a criticism (trope of predatory older artist) within the narrative doesn't "fix" the issue, either!

When he told Sunny the ingredients in what he'd brought....he always added at the end: y amor!

"Huauzontles y amor! Frijoles, epazote y amor! Tomatillo, serrano y amor!"

Ulla would say, "The love is in the sauce," which had always irritated Sunny. He wanted only sauce in his sauce. Or, if anything, a touch of irony in his sauce, or the devil in his sauce, or sauciness in his sauce.

"Please leave amor out! I'm allergic to it," begged Sunny.

"At some point before his death in 1345, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham (1287-1345) composed his Philobiblon ('Love of Books'), in which he set out to 'clear the love we have had for books from the charge of excess.'

I love de Bury's treatise: it is a battle-hymn for the value of books and learning: 'in books we climb mountains and scan the deepest gulfs of the abyss'."

This section reminds me of a neighbour from the subcontinent, who also thinks this kind of comment to near-strangers is perfectly fine...

#CultureShock

They played Iqbal Bano singing "Hum Dekhenge." The picture on the cassette cover showed the singer wearing a black sari to protest the dictatorship of Zia....

What happened within a family, what happened between a couple, was no different from that which happened in a nation under dictatorship, running on fear. Far above, planes blinked across the sky, and below, the madman in the ruins of the idgah came out and shouted....

Poor Tracy! 🤣

Oh no, I now want to immediately go to this bookshop and spend a large amount.. 😬