Even the "radical" bookstores are having a sale...

(Top left is Bookishly bottom left Ideal Bookshelf., I couldn't fit their logo in)

Martha Nussbaum argued... Western concern with cleanliness is ' a refusal to... be contaminated by a potent reminder of one's own mortality and animality'.

.....The Finnish philosopher Olli Lagerspetz takes comfort from the idea that hygiene can be suspect:

As a sometimes negligent householder... I am naturally soothed by the idea that exaggerated cleanliness is not next to godliness but to fascism and xenophobia.

Mark O'Connell of the New Yorker likes the idea that 'a nicely sharpened HB' can be so powerful, and is funny about it:

"I tend to slot mine behind my right ear, carpenter style; I like to think this lends a somewhat rough-and-ready aspect to my appearance as I sit reading Middlemarch on the bus home.

Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress....

However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.

If you couldn't already guess from my litsy spam, I loved this graphic novel. About a young man moving to New York to explore his dream of dancing on Broadway. Wonderful illustrations.

"I have had my dream-like others-
And it has come to nothing so that
I remain now carelessly
With feet planted on the ground,
And look up at the sky-
Feeling my clothes about me,
The weight of my body in my shoes,
The rim of my hat, air passing in and out
At my nose-and decide to dream no more."

"Thursday" by William Carlos Williams

Beautifully illustrated GN: this is a wordless depiction of one character's trauma.

Kerouac's inspiring tips for life...

[And I realised no matter what you do, it's bound to be a waste of time..]

Loved the way the author used these line drawings as chapter breaks.

Time for some scandi crime...

I really liked how this biography of Mary included the wider political context: Mary as figurehead for political protests.

King Henry (VIII) attempts to censor public criticism...

This way of collecting books for their look, rather than content, is a perennial cul-de-sac of collecting, observed by Seneca of scroll collectors in Roman times: 'Many use books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining room! [Some] get their pleasure merely from bindings and labels.'

Image Abbey Library of St. Gallen via https://www.1000libraries.com/post/2025-top-10-most-beautiful-libraries-in-the-w...

Wonderful look at language communities in New York.

Recommended!

Argh! I thought I had another chapter to go of the book I was *actually reading* but no, an "exclusive extract"...

'You're a tick boxes kinda guy,' his wife used to say. And according to one of his annual performance reviews, 'a pedestrian determination' was the 'hallmark' of his 'approach to policing'.

Admin were thinking of bringing in self-assessment; if they did that, Muecke was tempted to write, 'Still standing.'

If writing is honey in terms of sweetness, then writing one's own language is ambrosia. If writing is sauce, then writing one's own language is the seasoning [salt]. If reading is work, then reading one's own language is its respite. (Translated [from N'ko] by Coleman Donaldson.)

"The idea of the shtetl was formed by Yiddish literature,' says Boris, "by writers like Peretz and Sholem Aleichem ... living in the big cities." Whether transmuted through a Chagall painting or a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof, the shtetl has come to stand in for the whole vanished world of traditional Jewish life Eastern Europe, shrunk down to the scale of a folklorized village....

With all her languages, Rasmina is almost an unofficial, unpaid interpreter [in Seke]...

"It's what a lot of immigrants go through," she says...

...these things add up. She draws the line when aunties, like aunties everywhere, try to follow their kids onto social media: "The social media is getting to them. They're very addicted now. Every day somebody's mom is like, 'Make me Instagram, make me TikTok,' and I say, 'No thank you!"

Wishlisted....

#NYT #Booksnewsletter #nunbook

There was a great remembering that was also a great forgetting, one hundred years of silence ... of the convicts and Aboriginal people little was ever said. Of a slave system and a genocide nothing. What remained was either silence or lies. Such as: the convicts and their children had all fled to the mainland during the gold rushes. Such as: the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct, long gone...

My father's mother and father...were... illiterate. My father had...a sense of the magic of words that never left him, an awareness that those twenty-six abstract symbols could liberate if you understood them and oppress if you didn't.

He told me the written word was the first beautiful thing he ever knew, a line I stole and used elsewhere. What is a writer but a robber and what is the history of literature but a milky way of theft?

I missed my big sister greatly and the point of the books was to smuggle a message of love to her, and each book, every faux sentence and every scrawled picture of a word was simply saying that one word over and over.

And so at the beginning I learnt this: the words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything.

When I think about this moment, I remember one of my favourite lines from The Simpsons, when Chief Wiggum catches his son Ralph and Bart trying to get into a locked cupboard in his attic: 'What is your fascination with my forbidden closet of mystery?' But if I was to tell you that mere curiosity is what drove me up the esplanade that day, it would be a lie...

The nurse who drew my blood....watches this infected blood flow for days on end, and despite her translucent gloves she passes right next to the source of this poison, she strips off her gloves with a snap to place the bandage on the wound with her bare fingers...
... she says, "Your perfume-it's Habit Rouge, isn't it? I recognized it right away....to catch a whiff of it on this gray morning, well, you know it's really a little treat for me."

Coordinating with my winter reading cardigan!

Excited about an upcoming #JamesBaldwin #100 event

[Robert, Count de Montesquiou] realized that German idea of making your life a work of art: a gesamtkunstwerk.

...he made his upstairs flat over-looking the Seine into 'the mirror of my soul', exotically furnished with japonisme and books. Many of us look around our dwelling and see...a series of shabby compromises, half-loved inherited junk, broken things, lingering IKEA tat ...and does anyone, hand-on-heart, have the curtains they really want?

And I am not resigned, as old Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of Honey's favorites, would say. Lily says to Gazala;

Grief is such a stalwart, sturdy companion, maybe it just wrings the neck of pettiness for us all. Gazala opens her eyes and lifts her head to look right at Lily, She nods.
Oh, leave the pettiness, she says, if you can.
Try.

Shiny new book for the Xmas wishlist!

D'Agoult...returned an hour and a half later....and announced that he had new orders specifying that he arrest councilors Duval d'Éprémesnil and Goislard de Montsabert. At that point, according to several accounts, all the magistrates replied with one voice, "We are all Duval and Goislard. It is all of us you must arrest."

France 1788 #ImSpartacus

.

Note to self: Do not pick up anymore of Percival Everett's back catalogue unless a trusted reviewer recommends. Do not be seduced by shiny reissue covers.

"Don't pick up any wooden nickels."

Guessed what this meant, but had to look it up. Trying to think of a British equivalent.

/image from Wikipedia

Do enjoy a good acknowledgement.

Oh. Ah well.

#notmyfavourite !

This made me laugh, as I've heard it many times before.
#braai #notenglish

I really have no idea what's going on.

One of those books that should come with a link to the study notes...

I'm pretty sure I've bought this from charity shops more than once, having loved (of course) Fingersmith and The Night Watch. This is an early one centred around the women in Millbank women's prison in the 19th century. Is one of the prisoners talking to the spirits?

A bit too miserable for a very wet week!

Two down...

#10beforetheend @ChaoticMissAdventures

Loved this book, fascinating re-imagining of a real historical event, the abandoning of a young woman on an island off Canada during early French attempts at colonisation.

Apparently her house is for sale!
http://chateaudelamothe.fr/marguerite-de-la-rocque-16th-century-noblewoman-who-l...

We stood together, and I said, "I realize now-"
"What?" Auguste said.
"How easy my life has been."
Regretfully, Auguste said, "You have been rich, comfortable, and safe."
"No, I was never safe." My own words startled me, but they were true. If I was in danger here, so I had been at home. If I could not choose my dwelling place, that had been the case before. Following Auguste out. I thought. If we live in a cave, at least it will be ours only.

Phew, nearly there..

"Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey," said the linguist and polyglot Jakobson. In other words: it's possible to say anything in any language, but each language's grammar requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously. This is the essence of what makes linguistics fascinating and revealing.

I never knew my mother. She died the night that I was born, and so we passed each other in the dark.

#FirstLine

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?