So truepenny and I got more books today. We had to, you see. We each had a 20% off coupon for one of our fave used bookstores, which has three locations. So yesterday we visited one location and today we hit the other.

I really, really like having a downstairs neighbor who not only shares but cheerfully enables my book acquisition tendencies.

( today's acquisitions )

There's been a certain amount of book-related upheaval around here lately ( Read more... )

I've been mulling over the "what's your story?" question for some time now. melymbrosia put it this way: "What's the story to which you keep returning, as a reader or a writer?"

I thought of one right away and then thought no, it's too big; but upon further consideration I think it works for me so well precisely because it applies broadly and sustains ( Read more... )

As requested by brisingamenThe guiding principle I'm currently interested in for this class is the idea of the 18th c. as a sort of genre soup. All sorts of disparate genre elements (prose romances, the epistolary tradition, epic, crime journalism, satire, political and historical drama and narratives, travel narrative, picaresque, memoir, spiritual ( Read more... )

melymbrosia brought up favorite books.

My current core list:

Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice
A. S. Byatt, Possession
George Eliot, Middlemarch
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems & Plays
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Naomi Shihab Nye, Yellow Glove
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of ( Read more... )

Last week, truepenny posted about our half-in-jest personality litmus test: what is your favorite part of The Lord of the Rings? I was swamped with other stuff at the time and didn't post my own answer. So I'm doing it now.

( of course there's more than one answer. )

Salman Rushdie is one of those authors whose work I always adore. I've read far too few of his books. On the other hand, I've read the ones I have read multiple times, which counts for something I suppose ( Read more... )

Swiped from truepenny; originally from oursin ...

What poets do you have on your shelves? For the purposes of this list, they should be there by your choice (as opposed to being texts for courses, etc) and be either the collected or selected works of one single poet (anthologies and collections do not count, nor do Selections from Works which include, but do not ( Read more... )

Before we begin, I would like to point out that 1) I rarely have access to a good theatre-specific bookshop, so when you think about it I'm morally obligated to lavishly patronize the National's; 2) it's a wonder I didn't spend more of my time in Foyle's; 3) Blackwell's was having a 2-for-£10 special on books from the BBC Favorites list, to which I ( Read more... )

Living upstairs from a sff novelist and hard-core book geek is a bit like living in a library, with a very friendly and full-of-helpful-recommendations librarian. ("I like librarians." -- Hal Hartley, Trust) And I don't even feel guilty about requisitioning the books, because truepenny and the Minister of Hardware are frequent borrowers of my CDs, so it all ( Read more... )