The Art of Reading: Grace Reading at Howth Bay by William Orpen

Shakespeare Goes To The Olympics

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

     At the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics last night in London, Kenneth Branagh recited these lines taken from Caliban's speech in one of Shakespeare's final plays, The Tempest. Branagh was dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a famous British engineer known for building bridges, dockyards, and Britain's first major railroad, the Great Western Railway.

Waxing Poetic: Why Did I Dream Of You Last Night? by Philip Larkin

  
   Why Did I Dream Of You Last Night?

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

Ex Libris: This Book Belongs To...

    

     I have always been intrigued by bookplates.  There's something slightly thrilling about opening a book and finding a bookplate pasted inside the cover. I love browsing in used bookstores and coming across these small prints that give a glimpse of the previous owner and add history to the book.You don't often see them used these days and with the rise of e-books, they may well die out completely.  A bookplate, or Ex Libris, is a small print for pasting inside the cover of a book to express ownership.  Ex-Libris means "from the library of" and was frequently inscribed on bookplates which were printed on heavy paper and glued into books by the purchaser.
     Between the late 15th and 19th centuries, books were expensive, prestigious, luxury items.  Most were bound in leather, and printed in gilt. To own a book was to hold status in society.  Those wealthy enough to have books wanted something to identify them as the owner of a particular book.  So, they commissioned bookplates, a print they could paste inside the front cover. That way, anyone who read their book would know exactly who it belonged to.  The first bookplates usually incorporated the decorative coats of arms of the fabulously wealthy. By the late nineteenth century, bookplates had developed into a highly imaginative form of the engraver’s and printmaker’s art in miniature.
      Bookplates are highly collectible (either loose or attached to books).  Many collectors concentrate on specialized themes,  those designed by famous artists, or those owned by notable people, like this one belonging to Ernest Hemingway:

There are a number of organizations devoted to bookplate collecting, such as American Society of Bookplate Collectors & Designers and The Bookplate Society (UK).  They are very often of high value, exceeding that of the book in which they are placed.
     After reading more about them and seeing so many beautiful examples of vintage bookplates, I'm thinking of purchasing some and placing them in all the books in my personal library.  What do you think?  Do bookplates have a place in the increasingly paperless world?
     Here are some of my favorite from designs that I've come across on the internet:

The Art of Reading: Café 'Le lapin agile', Montmartre by Louis Abel-Truchet

Italo Calvino: Why Read the Classics?

Italo Calvino’s 14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic

1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’
2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.
4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

Bookish Quotes #46

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
~ Umberto Eco

 "Even books, word-things that should be judged by their content, fascinate me as objects.  I confess I have many books in my library that I have never read nor had the intention of reading.  I want them because their sheer presence represents a yearning, a mood, a love, and yes, an act of self-preservation.  When my eyes scan my library, the typefaces of the titles, the textures of the covers, and their imagined weight give me a moment very like the pleasure of reading."
~ Leo Lionni

An Interview with Hemingway: In Celebration of Papa's Birthday

     Today is Ernest Hemingway's Birthday.  He was born on July 21, 1899 - 113 years ago.  I came across an interview with Hemingway by George Plimpton that was published in the Spring 1958 issue of The Paris Review.  It was one of a series of interviews titled The Art of Fiction.  In addition to the interview, Plimpton describes Hemingway's writing room.  It's a vivid picture of the writer at work.  You can read the entire interview here, but here's an excerpt:

The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite walls. A large and low double bed dominates one section, oversized slippers and loafers neatly arranged at the foot, the two bedside tables at the head piled seven-high with books. In the other alcove stands a massive flat-top desk with a chair at either side, its surface an ordered clutter of papers and mementos. Beyond it, at the far end of the room, is an armoire with a leopard skin draped across the top. The other walls are lined with white-painted bookcases from which books overflow to the floor, and are piled on top among old newspapers, bullfight journals, and stacks of letters bound together by rubber bands.

It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases—the one against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his bed—that Hemingway has his “work desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and pamphlets. There is just enough space left on top of the bookcase for a typewriter, surmounted by a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east window.

A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover

     The English idiom "don't judge a book by its cover" is a metaphorical phrase which means "you shouldn't prejudge the worth or value of something, by its outward appearance alone".  But when it comes to books, how often do you do just that?
     When you peruse the shelves of a bookstore or library, how often does the cover make you pick up an unfamiliar book - or skim right past it?  I know that I am frequently drawn to a book by the cover art.  Obviously, publishers put a great deal of thought into the covers of the books they publish.  Currently, it is common practice to publish a book with several different covers with the idea of appealing to different groups of readers.
     But how many times have you been mislead by cover art?  Have you ever bought a book because you were attracted to the cover and then been disappointed when you read it?  Just think about it for a minute...if you had to go by the cover alone, how good would you be at predicting what the book was about?
     I came across an article on Babble in which a mother gives her six-year old daughter's ideas on what books are about based on their covers.  Some are pretty funny and some are not far off the mark.  You can read the list here, but these are some of my favorites:

 "I think it's a book about a haunted theme park and it stars a magical magic guy and he's good and evil and he's trying to get rid of the ghosts. And I think at the end, since it's haunted by a ghost, he tried to make the park go on fire and it did. "

 "This book is about a tree on a hill. The tree is the star of the book and it’s a very nice tree but everyone else is mean. I think the tree has a magical ring and some evil guys capture the ring and put him on the top of the hill so they can watch him. "

 “It looks weird. I think this must be a book about a tree. I would not read a book about just a tree. And it looks like it’s a sad tree too since it has no friends.” 

 "This is about a girl that goes mining. I don’t know why, but she looks like she would go mining, mining for gold. "

     

The Art of Reading: Jo Writing In The Attic by Norman Rockwell

Bookish Quotes #45

"Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I’m happy when I’m standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited."
~ Jeanette Winterson

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.”
~ Christopher Morley

Classics Trashed: One-Star Reviews of Literary Greats

     Its the ultimate cut:  a one-star review on Amazon.com.  But what if the books getting trashed are on Time's list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present?  The Morning News published an article called "Lone Star Statements" that reprinted sad one-star reviews of some literary greats.  You can read the entire article here, but here are some of the best of the worst reviews that are too good (or bad) not to be shared:

The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)

“The book is not readable because of the overuse of adverbs.”

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1939)

“While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway (1926)

“Here’s the first half of the book: ‘We had dinner and a few drinks. We went to a cafe and talked and had some drinks. We ate dinner and had a few drinks. Dinner. Drinks. More dinner. More drinks. We took a cab here (or there) in Paris and had some drinks, and maybe we danced and flirted and talked sh*t about somebody. More dinner. More drinks. I love you, I hate you, maybe you should come up to my room, no you can’t’… I flipped through the second half of the book a day or two later and saw the words ‘dinner’ and ‘drinks’ on nearly every page and figured it wasn’t worth the risk.”

     Actually, the Hemingway review is spot on but I love the book!

A Farewell to Arms: A Hemingway "Choose Your Own Adventure"

     Ernest Hemingway struggled with the ending of his 1929 novel, A Farewell to Arms.  He wrote 47 endings of the World War I story of an ambulance driver who falls in love with a nurse before he settled on the one that was published.  Now Scribners is releasing a new edition that includes all of the alternate endings.
     According to an article in The New York Times, "Hemingway also left behind a list of alternate titles, which are reprinted in the new edition. They include “Love in War,” “World Enough and Time,” “Every Night and All” and “Of Wounds and Other Causes.” One title, “The Enchantment,” was crossed out by Hemingway."
     The alternate endings have been preserved over the years  in Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.  Hemingway's struggle with the novel is preserved in handwritten pages like this sample of the first page of the novel.

      The alternate endings are interesting in that they show a legendary novelist at work but there is also the question of whether or not one should mess around with a classic.  What do you think?

The Art of Reading: The Garden Window by Daniel F. Gerhartz

A Song for Readers - My Baby Love a Bunch of Authors by Moxy Fruvous

     I had to share this song - very appropriate for us "book addicts" - My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors by Moxy Fruvous!  The YouTube video is not the best quality, but enjoy!

Here are the lyrics:

My Baby Loves A Bunch Of Authors  

Well you should see my story-reading baby, you should hear things that she says
She says "Hon, drop dead, I'd rather go to bed with Gabriel Garcia Marquez"
Cuddle up with William S. Burroughs, leave on the light for bell hooks
I been flirtin' with Pierre Burton 'cause he's so smart in his books
        I like to go out dancing
        My baby loves a bunch of authors
        My heart's so broke and bleedin'
        Baby's just sittin' there doin' some readin'
So I started watching some TV, played my new CD player too
She said "Turn it off or I'll call the cops, and I'll throw the book at you"
All this arguing made me get dizzy, called my doctor to came have a look
I said "Doctor, hurry!" She said: "Don't worry, I'll be over when I finish
        my book"
        I like to go out dancing
        My baby loves a bunch of authors
        We've been livin' in hovels
        Spendin' all our money on brand new novels
So I got myself on the streetcar and it drove right into someone
The driver said: "I was looking straight ahead!" but he was reading the]
        Toronto Sun
So my honey and me go to a counsellor to help figure out what we need
She said: "We'll get your love growin', but before we get goin' here's some
        books I'd like you to read"
        I like to go out dancing
        My baby loves a bunch of authors
        Lately we've had some friction
        'Cause my baby's hooked on short works of fiction
So we split and went to a party, some friends my girl said she knew
But what a sight 'cause it's authors night and the place looks like a who's who
Now I'm poundin' the Ouzo - with Mario Puzo
Who's a funny fella? - W.P. Kinsella
Who brought the cat? - would Margaret Atwood?
Who needs a shave? - he's Robertson Davies!
Ondartje started a food fight, salmon mousse all over the scene
Spilled some dressing on Doris Lessing these writer types are a scream!
        I like to go out dancing
        My baby loves a bunch of authors
        We'll be together for ages
        Eatin' and sleepin' and turnin' pages

Hemingway's Boat - Paul Hendrickson

     Those who follow this blog know that I'm a Hemingway fan.  Countless biographies of "Papa" have been written over the years but the most recent one looks at Hemingway's life from a new angle.  Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat:  Everything He Loved In Life And Lost, 1934-1961 covers the final 27 years of the writer's life and focuses on his beloved boat, Pilar, the one constant during this period.
     Pilar, purchased after the publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, became the writer's sanctuary.  It was a place to escape from literary criticism, the pain of failed marriages, and the stings of failed friendships.  Aboard the Pilar he entertained celebrities, relaxed with his children, caught prize fish, and, of course, drank heavily.  In following Hemingway through the years spent on Pilar, Hendrickson's biography also includes the other lives that weave in and out as well which serves to make "Papa" more human.  The portrait that emerges is much more sympathetic that many of the past biographies.

"In my opinion, too many previous Hemingway biographers and scholars have gleefully wished to point out so many of the toxic things that Hemingway did," Hendrickson said. "But one of the points I try to make is that, yes, without question he could be appalling to other people but ... there was this other side of him, this decent side that could come out instantly."

I found it thoroughly engaging and hard to put down.  If you're a Hemingway fan, you must read it; if you're not, this read might change your mind.


     On a related topic, a Hemingway Look-Alike Contest is held every year at Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West.  This year, the request of a three-time competitor has captured the attention of The Guardian.  Read about it here.

Waxing Poetic: I Go Back To The House For A Book by Billy Collins

I Go Back To The House For A Book

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

Book to Box Office

     With two film versions of classic novels due to premiere later this year - Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - my thoughts have turned to other books that have been adapted for the "big screen."  I always await them with apprehension and harbor a secret fear that they will disappoint me.  Some have been beautifully faithful to the text, others haven't, and sometimes (I hate to admit it) it doesn't matter.
     Here's a list of best, worst, etc. from the past:

• A Movie That Was Better Than the Book:  The Last of the Mohicans (sorry James Fenimore Cooper) 

• A Movie That Was a Perfect Adaptation of a Novel:  Rebecca - with Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, and Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers 

• A Favorite Movie Version of a Book That Has Been Done Multiple Times:  Jane Eyre - with William Hurt as Rochester and Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jane  

• Two Movie Versions That Are Equally Great in Their Own Way:  The Innocents (a version of the Turn of the Screw) starring Deborah Kerr and The Turn of the Screw starring Jodhi May 

•  Good and Bad Adaptations of a Novel:  Good - The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (with James D'Arcy, Sophia Myles, and Lee Ingleby) and Bad -  Nicholas Nickleby (with Charlie Hunnam, Romolai Garai, and Anne Hathaway)  

Best Books of the 2012 (So Far)

We're halfway through the year, so it's time to look back on 2012's reads so far and list favorites:

The End of the Affair - Graham Greene:  Loved this!  Set in London during and just after World War II, the novel examines the obsessions, jealousy and discernments within the relationships between three central characters: writer Maurice Bendrix; Sarah Miles; and her husband, civil servant Henry Miles.





The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje:  Again, set during World War II.  The story deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned English accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and an Indian sapper in the British Army as they live out the end of World War II in an Italian villa.



  

The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham:  Maugham is one of my favorite writers.  This is set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s and is the story of the beautiful but shallow young Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to a remote region of China ravaged by a cholera epidemic.





 
Consequences of the Heart - Peter Cunningham:  Wonderfully engaging.  A love story, a war story, a thriller, and a generational story of two Irish families.








Old School - Tobias Wolff:  Prep school, literary contests, famous writers - this is a book for book lovers and would-be writers!  Set in the early 1960s and narrated by the unnamed protagonist from the vantage point of adulthood, a scholarship boy at a New England prep school grapples with literary ambition and insecurity.








The Traveler - Antal Szerb: More Hungarian authors! I loved the two Dezso Kosztolanyi novels I read last year, but The Traveler tops them both. What's not to like? A honeymoon in Italy, a secret past, a missing childhood friend - I could not stop reading and cannot wait to find a copy of Szerb's Journey by Moonlight.





 
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins: My first Wilkie Collins and, so far, my favorite. This is a perfect mystery!









Lorna Doone - R. D. Blackmore: I finally read this novel after watching the 2001 film dozens of times. It's enormous and thankfully so. Blackmore managed to draw out the drama of Lorna Doone's life without once losing my interest.








The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde: It's hard to believe, but I had not read Dorian Gray before this year. That was my loss, really. I love this story (I have seen the 1945 film - featuring this painting - many, many times), and the end will never cease to surprise and shock me.







Piccadilly Jim - P. G. Wodehouse: I have previously read a few Jeeves and Wooster tales and Leave It to Psmith, but Piccadilly Jim is currently my favorite Wodehouse novel. There is Wodehouse's typical mistaken/false identity surrounding the character of Jimmy Crocker and convoluted plots for revenge. It is filled with witty scenes and a brilliant character in Ann Chester.