August 28, 2009

Books 'R Us




Swapmeet Books, 2009.



Himself: Loved it when I left for lunch.....he worked on the computers.

Herself: More viruses found on the old, storage Gateway. Great lunch with the poets.....I'm never going to be a poet tho.

Reading: Mitford. One of the poets at lunch today said she couldn't get any farther than the third because they were too bland, and had I read the Miss Reed series? I had to tell her that they were too bland for me....and we laughed together.

Balance: Begin working on the Alaskan Album. I love getting into this.

I found a wonderful book at an estate sale a week ago, "Great Sailing Ships" by Otmar Schauffelen. He lists by type all the wonderful sailing ships that were still intact as of his publishing date, 1969. Ships like the UNYO MARU or the DAR POMORZA. Never have I heard of them. Never have I seen them.

With my computer out of the running, I could not rush up the stairs to find out all about these magic ships. But, Oh, I wanted to. Now that I'm partially up and running again, perhaps this evening I can see if some of these stunning tall ships are still in our world today.

In the meantime, I'm bookishly tantalized by a list I found on LBH's lively pages. Bookworm: It says.....and that's certainly me, on reflection, certainly a shallow me.

"Rules: don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes."

Well......Me of little brains is a failure at this. Instead, I slowly note authors, childhood to adult. Books cushioning my abused childhood, and those that have comforted the abused adult me too. Somewhere in there, I grabbed a bit of education too:

1. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling.

2. The Secret Garden, and Little Lord Fauntleroy by Francis Hodgson Burnett is better than macaroni and cheese as comfort food.

3. Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov woke me to the worlds beyond my spot on earth.

4. Little Men, Little Women, and many others by Victorian authors who wrote for children.

5. An endless parade of the famous sci-fi writers of the 30's through the 90's: I'm not going downstairs to call off authors names....oh, how they woke up my brain.

6. Joseph C Lincoln's New England novels. Wonderful adventures in a new language.

7. The gentle prose of DE Stevenson as well as those adventures by Robert Louis Stevenson.

8. An endless parade of mysteries that stretch from the wonderful stuff written in the fifties through the new works published today. No, I'm not going in there and reading off authors or titles for you.

9. Anne McCaffrey's Pern books. She too found a way of feeding her kids without going out to work.

10. Sir Banister Fletcher's History Of Architecture remains the best tho it is the heaviest. I like the 1950's edition best.

11. Helen Gardner's Art Through the Ages: the first and overall best art history book.

12. Lois McMaster Bujold's The Vorkosegian Saga: You will laugh; you will cry.

13. Elizabeth Cadell's her brisk imagination carry's us dashing through many good meaty romances.

14. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord then later Ballard's Titanic books and other sunken ship books created an endless interest in the great liners that has never waned.

15. Irving Penn shaped my sense of composition and form long before I ever entered art school. From artists like this, I learned to see.

2 comments:

  1. Mage, it is hard to read your words of your abused childhood. Yet, with books it is possible to survive. Not necessarily come out whole, but at least come out with a belief in something better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are a phoenix, Maggie. Getting to know you by reading your daily entries, it is hard to recognize in you this abused child. What resilience, what courage, what spirit saved you?

    ReplyDelete

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