Things that really matter

I picked up this book due to a recommendation I heard from Lexicon Valley, a Slate podcast about language which is super interesting. A Jane Austen Education follows William Weresiewicz as he works on his dissertation. He begins graduate school disliking Austen basically on principal, preferring more modern and complicated works like Ulysses. This is a view I have gotten from a lot of people (mostly men) who think that Austen is boring.

Each chapter covers one of Austen's books and is tied to how Weresiewicz grows from a young adult into a well rounded person. The transition that he goes through is especially interesting to me since I feel that I am in the same age of change as he was. For example, this really hit home for me:

"When you're young - when you're in high school and college and even your early twenties - you take your friends for granted. Of course they'll always be there. You take friends for granted. Why would you ever have trouble making new ones? Then all of a sudden - and it can feel very sudden indeed - everybody's gone. Some have moved, some have married, everyone's busy, and the crowd of potential friends by which you've always been surrounded has evaporated." 

One thing I was grateful about was that despite these books being around for forever and having so many adaptations of them, Weresiewicz never gives away the ending to any of them. Which is great because I have a confession to make. I, lover of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Austen in general, have never read two of her books. Mansfield Park and Persuasion have just never made it onto my selves and after reading this book, I am committed to buying, reading, and loving them. I also think I might dust of an Austen biography that has been sitting on my selves for a long time.

A full Austen loving convert, Weresiewicz ties in thoughtful pieces of critical reading of her works and information about her life in a way that I think would be accessible even to those who aren't Austen crazy. I highly suggest it.

looking for the library where it lives

I haven't been blogging too much lately because I have been very busy starting graduate school! I am going for my Master's degree in Library and Information Studies. Classes started about two weeks ago and I am really enjoying them so far.

Library: An Unquiet History, was my first assigned book for one of my classes. I actually picked this one up awhile ago because it seemed like an interesting read. It was certainly nice not to have to buy this at the school bookstore, where it, along with every other book, was overpriced.

Battles covers an overview and histories of libraries throughout time. The book is a bit scattered, jumping from place to place and from idea to idea. It seems a bit unorganized but interesting. Many of the things he talks about I would want to read more about, such as the ancient Muslim libraries which were just as impressive, if not more so, than the library at Alexandria. He hits the big topics, Alexandria, Guettenburg, the Nazi book burning, and the development of modern libraries.

I think this is a good book to get a quick look into the world of library history, however, I think that there are some better more complete works out there, such as A Gentle Madness by Nicholas A. Basbanes, which covers book collecting and libraries. Basbanes book is much longer than Battles, but far more interesting.

One, heartbreaking quote:

"Andras Riedlmayer described a colleague who survived the siege of Sarajevo. In the winter, the scholar and his wife ran out of firewood, and so began to burn their books for heat and cooking. 'This forces one to think critically,' Riedlmayer remembered his friend saying. 'One must prioritize. First you burn old college textbooks, which you haven't read in thirty years. Then there are the duplicates. But eventually, you're forced to make tougher choices. Who burns today: Dostoevsky or Proust?' I asked Riedlmayer if his friend had any books left when the war was over. 'Oh yes,' he replied, his face lit by a flickering smile. 'He still had many books. Sometimes, he told me, you look at the books and just choose to go hungry."

A pearl of fasinating tales

Oy oy oy trying to keep up with myself.

I picked up this book: Once Again to Zelda: the stories behind literature's most intriguing dedications by Marlene Wagman-Geller, becase I really enjoy reading about books. But I was really dissapointed in it.

The book goes through many different books and explains the dedications behind them. The material is very interesting, and I learned a lot about different authors and their backgrounds. What I did not like about the book was the fact that the author felt compelled to include the cheesiest, sappiest sentiments. For example, in the chapter on McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the last sentence is: "Maybe in the next world, unlike this one, her heart no longer had to be "a lonely hunter"." ack ack ack ack ack. Stuff like that makes me want to hurl. And she puts stuff like that in a least twice a chapter. Ugh.

I'd rather read a biography on any of these authors than read this book again. Although maybe if I cut out the begining and the ends of each chapter I could forgo the gagging.

Books are good company

I finished Nabokov's Butterfly by Rick Gekoski last week.

Ok, ever since I picked up A Gentle Madness, I have found books that are about books very interesting. I like reading about rare books and the passion that some people devote to collecting and preserving them. Gekoski describes a book in each chapter that he has come across in his rare book dealing. There is a lot of insight into the history of the authors. Lolita, the Hobbit, Harry Potter, Animal Farm, and the Satanic Verses are all included.

I guess I don't have too much to say about this one. It was a good read for sure. One quote:"Because there's nothing as reassuring and reliable as a book. I don't mean physically, though books resist the passage of time considerably better than humans do, but emotionally. Books are good company, their presence brightens up a room: they become a difining feature of one's personal landscape."

I left Zipporah at my mom's so I dont know when I'll finish that one. However, I picked up the Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya the other day and am 30 pages away from finishing. Sneak peak - I think it is amazing.