Quotations: Calvino

n the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, with a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress where other troops are holding out:

     the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,

     the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

     the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,

     the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

     the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

     the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

     the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large, but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them...

 From If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino. Wonderful book, you should go read it.

Photos of phood

This morning started out with slightly frenetic whipping of eggs, cream and mascarpone, followed by some folding and chilling, all of which led to this evening, when I laid out the strawberries and added lemon glaze... I'm pretty pleased with the results, but I'm very nervous that the nut crust will do its usual thing and refuse to dislodge itself from the confines of the pie plate. ah well. It will still be very, very tasty. Unfortunately I wont know until we get to the brunch party tomorrow. Impatience.

And wouldn't it be nice if I could include a digital taste in posts about food? Like scratch and sniff.

And then dinner tonight (after a batch of banana bread to take over to friends) is about to be fresh pasta with spinach, tofu, and green garlic pesto. Fresh pasta is wonderful, but it's very difficult to roll out by hand. The dough is quite stiff, and pressing down firmly enough with a rolling pin to get the sheet thin enough to make reasonable sized pasta is enough to make my carpal tunnel twinge.
And while I was out earlier I bought (extravagantly) a very clean, plastic covered jacketed copy of James Beard's bread book from Capitol Hill Books (staffed by an appropriately grumpy old guy and piled to the ceiling, literally, with books. Including the bathroom.). I'm pretty excited about it.

I have no words

Last fall I was beginning to explore ideas for my Plan of Concentration project in the world of children's books and attended a book making workshop with Linda Lembke of Green River Bindery. At that point it was my intention to create my own wordless picture book using my own photographs to tell a semi-autobiographical story. The original concept was a little too much to execute in the time I had, so the eventual product was simplified considerably (result is the purple book with the leaves at left). Now apart from the fact that the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (BMAC) is awesome (It's one of the things that enamored me to Brattleboro in the first place, thanks to an Andy Warhol exhibit) there's the fact that I love children's books and bookbinding as an art. So, all of this led to my being at an exhibit of artwork from Kaori Hamura's book Dream Seasons, a wordless narrative illustrated with stylized paintings on wood (if you like paintings on wood, also check out Audrey Kawasaki). The exhibit also included a list of other wordless children's books and related works, and I thought I'd share some of it here. The list was originally produced by BMAC, but I'm adding a few books of my own, as well.

Wordless Children's Books
David Wiesner is pretty good at purely illustrated stories, and wildly popular, too. My favourites are Tuesday, and Sector Seven, but there's also Flotsam and Free fall and a few others. He's very adept at putting the extraordinary into a context that makes it seem quite, well, ordinary, as in the cloud factory in Sector Seven, but while maintaining a sense of wonder, as in Tuesday.

Chris Van Allsburg put together a book of illustrations that are explained only by a single line of text that merely alludes to a greater, unknown story and inspires plenty of speculation among readers. The Mysteries of Harris Burdick goes under wordless books for me because so much of the value of the book comes from what the reader's mind creates to fill in the whole story behind each illustration.

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is just a plain beautiful book. It's more of a graphic novel, with many, many detailed illustrations in order to get the story across, but still with plenty of room for imagination (which is what I think wordless books are really all about).

A few more, which you may look up on your own (builds character):
Home, by Jeannie Baker
Museum, by Barbara Lehman
Oops, by Arthur Geisert
The Red Book, also by Lehman
The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs
Trainstop, also by Lehman
Un-brella, by Scott Franson
Yellow Umbrella, by Jae-Soo Lui

If you're into this sort of thing, go check out the tag lists for Wordless, Stories Without Words, and Wordless Books on LibraryThing.


Do you prefer book links to LibraryThing or to Amazon? I think LT provides more information on a book, but if you want to go buy it right away you might want Amazon. However, I highly recommend hunting down books at your local bookshop, or at least clicking through a website like FlashlightWorthy, which provides awesome books lists and could use some support. If you're actually reading this, why not comment? Comments are constructive!

On Books and Sharing

I have determined that sharing books makes them more enjoyable for all parties involved. This means that being a librarian is a fantastic job! I've also found that passing off a book to a friend, or receiving one, makes reading a shared experience, instead of a private one. I used to always have my pile of books that I would blaze through and not really talk about with anyone. Books were a private affair, something personal and intimate that had nothing to do with anyone else. Of course, books present themselves differently to each reader depending on that person's history, but there are certainly things that may be common to multiple readers, and this is what is enjoyable when sharing.

And in the vein of sharing, don't forget about Bookcrossing, where you can tag and release a book into the wild. I found my first Bookcrossing book in Glastonbury Tor, lying on a bench in the corner. It was Caught in the Light, and it was a very odd read, but something new and different that I might not have picked out for myself. Having another person's insight (un-informed in this case) into what I might like broadens the spectrum of book possibilities.

Recently, I've shared the following books in some way:

MFK Fisher's Gastronomical Me, originally lent to me by Tristan (who might in some circumstances be called my boss) when he found that I was helplessly interested in the culture and cooking of food. The book came to me at a critical turning point in my life in the Fall of 2008, and gave me great hope for the future, not to mention inspiration for a way of living fully. I received my own copy as a birthday gift this year, and immediately passed it on to Dan, who is plodding through it and enjoying it thoroughly.

Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, came to me from D, although we found the copy together in the Arlington Public Library's bookshop. There's a theme emerging here about food writing, which goes on to include Deep Economy (to some extent. Also lent to me by T) and Secret Ingredients, which I picked up in a moment of impulsiveness at Brattleboro Books (website has issues).

I just passed off The World Without Us to T last night, my copy of Ex Libris is with D, and I'm moseying around in D's copy of High Tide in Tuscon. I ritually post links in my twitter to interesting reviews, poke people when I think they might like something, and talk to shopkeepers and librarians for recommendations. The nice guy in Mystery on Main (David?) and I spent a while perusing shelves for books about books (a new favourite category, along with food/cookbooks). We came up with The Last Detective and The Oxford Murders, which I need to go back and get. At the time I bought Booked to Die and The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. All of this was inspired by The Club Dumas (made into the movie The 9th Gate), which was lent to me by Don, mid 2008. At some point I'll collect more of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's books.

Of course, before any of my books leave home, I brand them with my embossing stamp, just to be sure then come back.

Questions for readers: Too many links? Would you prefer links to Amazon for books? I think Library thing is more useful for seeing recommendations, tags and similar works with.