A Blogging Book Club
I love the idea of having a sort of blog book club where I can talk about books with friends whom I cannot meet at a cafe. A state-wide, inter-state, international book club....how much fun!Having enjoyed Year of Wonders I need to read March and People of the Book, which Mum read and loved. I just have a few other books to finish off first...
We have recently been refurbishing our library and part of that process has been to install face-out shelving. This means that as you walk through the shelves you see not only rows and rows of spines but areas where the book covers face out. This has been a revelation. I knew it would be a good move but I was unprepared for the extent to which it makes a difference. At the bottom of the stairs, at the beginning of our fiction collection, is a large shelf that is all face-out. We must refill it every couple of hours, sometimes more. Each staff member fills it differently and it is something of a game to guess who did it last. Margot fills it with nothing but blockbuster crime novels, which disappear instantly. I try to put a good mix of books but do tend to go for literature with pretty covers. The other day I was sure that Michael had filled it as the book were a bit left of centre. That was when I picked up The Horla by Guy de Maupassant. The copy contains three versions of the novella and is a story of a man's descent into madness - published just before the author was put away for insanity. It was fascinating and such beautiful language which I thought was very clever seeing as it is a translation. I wonder if Linda is able to read the original?
My office is upstairs where the non-fiction collection is and I have walked past these shelves for two and a half years and only occasionally have had to stop to look at a book. Now that I see covers , I can hardly walk past without stopping to look at an intriguing non-fiction book. I've seen books about Oscar Wilde's sister, Iris Murdoch and countless others. I took home a pictorial record of the 1920s because I had to look at each photo, it was just so interesting. I now have a book called The Pleasure of Reading which has pieces by forty authors such as Margaret Atwood, Germaine Greer, Catherine Cookson and Tom Stoppard about their own reading including a list of their top ten books - it's so good. I also have The Little Black Book of Books: A Century of the Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Rocked the Literary World. If only I could read all day.....
Now, to another great passion....food. Tonight I made miso chicken with udon and snow peas and cucumber salad. It is a Jill Dupleix recipe from delicious. We all enjoyed it though Bethany made sure we all knew that she didn't like the cucumber or the flavour of the chicken, as she ate everything.
While we ate she told me that when she grows up she would like to be Cinderella, no, Ariel. Now I was most pleased about this because the first thing I remember wanting to be when I grew up was a mermaid. I had the whole thing worked out and can still picture the green-tiled hospital room where I imagined the doctor would remove my legs and attach a pearly green tail. I told Bethany that I, too, had wanted to be a mermaid, excited that we shared a dream but she just frowned and said "But you didn't!"
We have recently been refurbishing our library and part of that process has been to install face-out shelving. This means that as you walk through the shelves you see not only rows and rows of spines but areas where the book covers face out. This has been a revelation. I knew it would be a good move but I was unprepared for the extent to which it makes a difference. At the bottom of the stairs, at the beginning of our fiction collection, is a large shelf that is all face-out. We must refill it every couple of hours, sometimes more. Each staff member fills it differently and it is something of a game to guess who did it last. Margot fills it with nothing but blockbuster crime novels, which disappear instantly. I try to put a good mix of books but do tend to go for literature with pretty covers. The other day I was sure that Michael had filled it as the book were a bit left of centre. That was when I picked up The Horla by Guy de Maupassant. The copy contains three versions of the novella and is a story of a man's descent into madness - published just before the author was put away for insanity. It was fascinating and such beautiful language which I thought was very clever seeing as it is a translation. I wonder if Linda is able to read the original?
My office is upstairs where the non-fiction collection is and I have walked past these shelves for two and a half years and only occasionally have had to stop to look at a book. Now that I see covers , I can hardly walk past without stopping to look at an intriguing non-fiction book. I've seen books about Oscar Wilde's sister, Iris Murdoch and countless others. I took home a pictorial record of the 1920s because I had to look at each photo, it was just so interesting. I now have a book called The Pleasure of Reading which has pieces by forty authors such as Margaret Atwood, Germaine Greer, Catherine Cookson and Tom Stoppard about their own reading including a list of their top ten books - it's so good. I also have The Little Black Book of Books: A Century of the Greatest Books, Writers, Characters, Passages and Events that Rocked the Literary World. If only I could read all day.....
Now, to another great passion....food. Tonight I made miso chicken with udon and snow peas and cucumber salad. It is a Jill Dupleix recipe from delicious. We all enjoyed it though Bethany made sure we all knew that she didn't like the cucumber or the flavour of the chicken, as she ate everything.
While we ate she told me that when she grows up she would like to be Cinderella, no, Ariel. Now I was most pleased about this because the first thing I remember wanting to be when I grew up was a mermaid. I had the whole thing worked out and can still picture the green-tiled hospital room where I imagined the doctor would remove my legs and attach a pearly green tail. I told Bethany that I, too, had wanted to be a mermaid, excited that we shared a dream but she just frowned and said "But you didn't!"
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