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February 14, 2011

Comments

Sarah Norman

God, I can't even imagine having so many books! I read a lot, but curiously, I dont' really like owning books - I find it oppressive for some reason. But I do envy you the chance to just run your idea down a shelf - sounds fabulous. I find my blog is kind of like my bookshelf for that reason nowadays

Gary

TEV, a book you ought read (I know, I know, coals to Newcastle) is Susan Hill's "Howards End is on the Landing". She deals with the "problem" you describe in an enchanting way.

Niall

The Kindle is really changing how I think of my library. I'm like you - with a huge physical library I've lugged around my whole life. And I'm glad I have. But I'm wondering if in the future my library will fit on a single device...I wonder what Walter Benjamin would say about that?

TEV

I love the title, Gary - just ordered the book. Thanks!

Niall - Or Borges, for that matter?

Aleja

I can relate, though I'm sure I don't have one tenth the books you have. I'm in Europe going to University and I've brought quite a few of my books with me (collected a few more while I'm here, too) but even more are in boxes in storage back in the States... my parents moved in my absence and now they're even more beyond my reach...

It's a sad state of affairs, to be sure.

Aleja

Sorry, missed Niall's comment originally but couldn't refrain from posting again:

My father and I joke about SD cards one day being able to hold the entire Library of Congress... and how easy it would be to lose! Set it down for a second on your desk, put it in a pocket with a hole...

Jolene

Niall/TEV - Or Kluge? I can see the short story now: "The Pocket-Sized Library".

Niall

I find I use the Kindle mainly for non-fiction. I still somehow can't see myself reading literature on it. Though I'm tempted to download "2666", if only because in book form it's so damn unwieldly.

melbournegirl

Not sure though, Gary, given Mark's appreciation of Carey and Coetzee, both of whom we claim as Australian authors, that he would appreciate Susan Hill's rather glib dismissal of Australian literature on p. 70.

melbournegirl

P.S. I bought it for the title too!

Susan Messer

I wonder what happened to your father's collection. That's the thing about collections . . . what is to become of them. They take up so much space, collect dust, need to be packed and unpacked when/if one moves or dies.

Lauren Cerand

My friend A. invited me out to the Hamptons to a thing JS is doing in April at the Parrish Art Museum: http://www.parrishart.org/upcoming.asp?id=378 So I'll likely skip the Paris Review do, as now it looks as though it'll be far less scenic than my current option. Wish you could come! Do I ever.

Gary

Melboumegirl, I often disagreed with Susan Hill (can't appreciated Jane Austen? Heresy!). I loved the book nonetheless. I thought it one of the most charming books I've read in years.

Ali Palmer

Your Banville collection is making me salivate!

Alysson Oliveira

I love pictures of bookshelves. Yours (pictures and shelves) are very nice!:)
congrats!

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."