Books, books, books
Just a few shots of the books books books EVERYWHERE.
Certainly enough for a rainy day, and this is just a small sampling from my they’re-everywhere collection. Like old friends, always wonderful to return to, and to pick up and read – for many a wonderful journey. Admittedly – mostly poetry, literature, art, fiction, and lots of dictionaries! Remember that post – “What’s on your bookshelf?” I’d still like to know…
I heart poetry and fine art
In the poetry department I have Neruda, Paz, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Celan, Piercy – newly found Amy Lemmon – and so much more that I return to over and over.
In the art department I am admittedly an addict. Books on modern and contemporary art mostly (20th century) – Richard Diebenkorn, Pierre Alechinsky and the CoBrA artists, Abstract Expressionists Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, an assortment of surrealists (André Masson, Fred Deux, René Magritte) and a broad selection of others including Egon Schiele (amazing), Paul Klee (of course), Henry Moore (sculpture mostly), Marlene Dumas, Jean Dubuffet… too many to name! I smile just thinking of the masterpieces these artists have created, and seeing them in my imagination.
Yes, I will admit to a few past lives… there are also law books, management books, marketing & PR books, design books, and two enormous shelves of French and Russian literature… I can’t bear to part with them! They’re family. And then there are the all-time favorites by Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Annie Proulx (Shipping News), Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel), and other works of literature that are filled with passion for life and language.
Books as family
How do you feel about your books? Are they like friends and family to you? Meanwhile – enjoy perusing just a few of the books that surround me.
Extra! Extra!
Might I recommend a gorgeous book of poems? Amy Lemmon’s Saint Nobody (2009) – delicate, powerful, poignant. For a mini-review, peek here.
Ah! Wow. You know what struck me, looking at these? We have a fair amount in common.
Neruda is fantastic, isn’t he? I’m particularly fond of his sonnet that begins, “Don’t go far off…not even for a day.”
I have the same e.e. cummings book. My favorite of his is “somewhere i have never traveled.” I have that one memorized. What a great love poem.
My French is relatively rusty though I continue to study via Rosetta Stone. When I was in Paris last year, I got by well enough. I joked that I got through Bonne exclusively by saying, “Oui, c’est bon!”
I am rather fond of my books. I read them and remember reading them for the first time and so they serve much the same purpose as a photo-album, I suppose.
-R.
I’m very attached to my books. Many of them are, to me, like photographs. They snapshot a moment of revelation in my life, and can bring me back to a place and time and age as quickly as a fragrance or a measure of music. Cool, no?
If you don’t know this one, by Neruda, you should. I went searching on the net for it, couldn’t find it, so I typed it in from the book, Extravagaria, and here it is, in “Other Stuff.” Powerful words. My kind of bible.
Just clicked over from Corinne’s Friday post because I am so obsessed with books and bookshelves that I felt compelled to come and spy on yours. We have three different book collections in our house: fiction (domestic and foreign), plays, and art in the dining room; history, philosophy, and poetry in Husband’s office; and a hodgepodge of politics, theory, biography, etc. in our basement. I could not live in a house without books. I never feel more at home than in a room with walls covered with, bubbling over with books.
I am the opposite. I recycle most books to the library or to friends. Not many on my bookshelves.
🙂 I adore being surrounded by books. Stacked on the floors, tables, everywhere. Feels great to me.
D!
thank you for the tap-on-the-shoulder link from Our house to Yours.
love the idea that you keep books from former-lives.
that says something very nice about you.
as does the sheer focus on poetry.
soul-filled and winsome.
yes.
*smilingwithjetlag*
tg xxx
I hoped you wouldn’t mind, tg… but I thought you might enjoy browsing my shelves. 🙂
And tea for that jet lag, n’est-ce-pas?
I couldn’t resist. I’m a bookshelf voyeur. I admit!!!! 😀
but actually my iPad/kindle collection start to show signs of outgrowing my actual book collection. and I love it. so little device, so MANY books.
I did not show my book shelves as you and TG, but as soon as I set up BeautyCalypse, I created a page called Book Hooked to somehow substitute the “about” pages: http://beautycalypse.wordpress.com/beautycalypse/book-hooked/
As I’m up in the middle of the night today (on European time?)… I’m going to check out your book hooked, nath! 🙂
OMactualdearG 4 am? not much cop in going to sleep then, huh? 😀
then you might as well read some.
Slept 3 hours then up for the day, tra la… (Channeling a need for café au lait… in a French café?) Well, it’s an excellent time of day when you wish to quietly read the paper! And then anything else tempting, yes!
actually IF one has got enough sleep (say, to bed at 10, awake at 4) it can be the best working time EVER: no phone calls, no facebook updates, no twitter stream (well, actually: YES, if you follow folks around the globe, as you do) – work gets done all by itself 🙂