Reading as the only recourse for a HOT Summer
...okay, aside from plunging into a swimming pool, the ocean, rivers. If you have any of those nearby. I could really do with a trip to the beach. Anyway.
You ever go through periods where you are reading voraciously, where even eating a tasty treat creme brulee or watching a diverting program too many to list can't live up to your rapacious desire for more books?
Of course, the main reason why I can string sentences together presently is because the heat broke and it is overcast. Was going to write a few sentences about how meltingly hot it is and then slap a picture and be done with it. But I am feeling significantly more animated now!
I've had all of these books on my shelves on Celtic Myths, rhythms, animals, beliefs, poetry, folktales, contributions to Western Civilization, you name it, for years. But I haven't gotten around to reading half of them, except for some of the books on poetry and folk tales. I am not certain why. Most of them were gifts, probably a not so subtle hint from my Irish Catholic mother to read up on our ancestors! I had some Norse books for a time when I was going through, all right, I hate the way that this sounds but I have already started the sentence, damn it, when I was going through a Norse "phase" (pardon all of these crazy questionably grammatical fragments). Why not, right? It's fascinating stuff and my dad is English and we know that they are an amalgam of everyone who ever partied in the British Isles up until William the Conqueror, and beyond once they began colonizing everybody everywhere. I speak about them in the third person as if I'm not completely related to them. :P There is practically no point to this paragraph except to illustrate how my Celtic books would stare reproachfully at me whenever I cracked the spine of Norse Myth or The Poetic Edda, the Johnny Come Latelies of my bookshelf who jumped the reading queue whilst they had been sitting patiently trying to attract my notice for far longer. I used to know a guy named Stephen who was a Celtic Reconstructionist and who hissed (literally) in the general direction of anyone studying the Norse pantheon. He seemed to think that I was being more than vaguely traitorous. :D....
It's not as if my books are taking up arms and assaulting one another for rights to the shelf...and if the books do not mind, I do not see that I should terribly. I'll read what I want!
Intermission: It's raining!!!
Be that as it may, I have a pile of books and I was a little naughty earlier this week and I went and added to the pile, then proceeded to tear through it. Well, the tearing is in progress. Rather than reading one book, setting it down and then progressing to another, I am reading four or five at once. They are not several hundred page narratives after all. There are tales, poems, histories. I am also re-reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu and this fun little piece of Gothic fun:
I figured that a gothic novel is just the perfect thing to read under a tree (or indoors if it is insufferable out there) during Summer in one's spare time. The characters are forever exclaiming at shadows and ruminating on their worst fears and anxieties (usually as regards whatever may or may not be stirring in the shadows literally or metaphorically). Or else there are unseen enemies (aside from whatever may or may not be lurking in the dark waiting to get them), lightning flashes, dark woods, upturned carriages, damsels shut up in convents, secret doors, noblemen fleeing debt, castles, ruined abbeys, surly townsfolk, highly perceptive manservants, and a quote from a forlorn sounding poem/play at the beginning of every chapter.
I like vaguely spooky/pretty, mouldering, old archways. Though this one looks structurally sound. I like it when the masonry is so entrenched with vines and trees and shrubbery that the plants are all that is holding the stones together anymore.
I will leave you with my Current Obsession: Prokofiev's Four Pieces, Op. 32, especially the Dance and the Gavotte. Actually, they are all really good. <333
This entry was also posted at http://ivybellis.dreamwidth.org/161089.html.
You ever go through periods where you are reading voraciously, where even eating a tasty treat creme brulee or watching a diverting program too many to list can't live up to your rapacious desire for more books?
Of course, the main reason why I can string sentences together presently is because the heat broke and it is overcast. Was going to write a few sentences about how meltingly hot it is and then slap a picture and be done with it. But I am feeling significantly more animated now!
I've had all of these books on my shelves on Celtic Myths, rhythms, animals, beliefs, poetry, folktales, contributions to Western Civilization, you name it, for years. But I haven't gotten around to reading half of them, except for some of the books on poetry and folk tales. I am not certain why. Most of them were gifts, probably a not so subtle hint from my Irish Catholic mother to read up on our ancestors! I had some Norse books for a time when I was going through, all right, I hate the way that this sounds but I have already started the sentence, damn it, when I was going through a Norse "phase" (pardon all of these crazy questionably grammatical fragments). Why not, right? It's fascinating stuff and my dad is English and we know that they are an amalgam of everyone who ever partied in the British Isles up until William the Conqueror, and beyond once they began colonizing everybody everywhere. I speak about them in the third person as if I'm not completely related to them. :P There is practically no point to this paragraph except to illustrate how my Celtic books would stare reproachfully at me whenever I cracked the spine of Norse Myth or The Poetic Edda, the Johnny Come Latelies of my bookshelf who jumped the reading queue whilst they had been sitting patiently trying to attract my notice for far longer. I used to know a guy named Stephen who was a Celtic Reconstructionist and who hissed (literally) in the general direction of anyone studying the Norse pantheon. He seemed to think that I was being more than vaguely traitorous. :D....
It's not as if my books are taking up arms and assaulting one another for rights to the shelf...and if the books do not mind, I do not see that I should terribly. I'll read what I want!
Intermission: It's raining!!!
Be that as it may, I have a pile of books and I was a little naughty earlier this week and I went and added to the pile, then proceeded to tear through it. Well, the tearing is in progress. Rather than reading one book, setting it down and then progressing to another, I am reading four or five at once. They are not several hundred page narratives after all. There are tales, poems, histories. I am also re-reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu and this fun little piece of Gothic fun:
I figured that a gothic novel is just the perfect thing to read under a tree (or indoors if it is insufferable out there) during Summer in one's spare time. The characters are forever exclaiming at shadows and ruminating on their worst fears and anxieties (usually as regards whatever may or may not be stirring in the shadows literally or metaphorically). Or else there are unseen enemies (aside from whatever may or may not be lurking in the dark waiting to get them), lightning flashes, dark woods, upturned carriages, damsels shut up in convents, secret doors, noblemen fleeing debt, castles, ruined abbeys, surly townsfolk, highly perceptive manservants, and a quote from a forlorn sounding poem/play at the beginning of every chapter.
I like vaguely spooky/pretty, mouldering, old archways. Though this one looks structurally sound. I like it when the masonry is so entrenched with vines and trees and shrubbery that the plants are all that is holding the stones together anymore.
I will leave you with my Current Obsession: Prokofiev's Four Pieces, Op. 32, especially the Dance and the Gavotte. Actually, they are all really good. <333
This entry was also posted at http://ivybellis.dreamwidth.org/161089.html.