the arbness of book lists

book lists, i really don't get them. whether it's 32 books that will change your life or 50 incredibly difficult books for extreme readers or the guardian's top 100 books of all time or just the list that my goodreads literary adventures group wants to read in 2014, they're all so subjective. tho' the guardian isn't as far off as the others. i mean, that 50 difficult books list doesn't even include ulysses. not even i, who have had an entire semester-long course devoted only to ulysses and wrote a 25 page paper on it, have finished the damn thing. then there's my own list of the 88 books i read in 2013 (+ 7 harry potter, which aren't on the list). it's not so much subjective as eclectic. and i'm not recommending that anyone else follow it. i just like that goodreads helps me keep track of what i've read. i'd never have remembered reading all those books. hell, at my age, i hardly remember yesterday.

that said, i do love the book lists on brainpickings. they're often recommendations by theme, like this one of 9 books on reading and writing. especially because no. 9, mortimer j. adler's how to read a book, advocates writing in books as you read them (something which i love to do), saying that it's even essential to do so (with apologies to denmark's libraries). or this one, on the year's best books on writing and creativity. or the best children's, illustrated and picture books of 2013.  quality lists, thoughtfully composed, that i like.

my reading right now (and most of the time) is all over the place. i've spent far too long on this nick harkaway angelmaker book. it was recommended by the same bloggy friend who recommended edna farber's marvelous so big, so i had to read it, even if it wasn't the kind of book i'd normally read.  it is very imaginative and well-written, with lovely and unique turns of phrase, and even features some steampunk machinery, which i love, but for some reason, i'm reading it at a snail's pace. and it's not going to help that liz gilbert's signature of all things just arrived via amazon today, as i'm going to want to dive right into that. and i have to, because in ten days, i have a book club meeting where we're going to discuss it (plus it was my idea to read it for the book club, so i'd better have finished it).

how do you decide what to read? do you read more than one book at a time (that's part of my problem)? does the internet get in the way of your reading? or does knitting? i recently listened to an audio book of a danish thriller while knitting but i wonder if that counts as reading? when do you read? i tend to read before going to sleep, but if i'm enthralled by a book, i read whenever i can. i also often read while i'm eating lunch. i also like to read in front of the fire in the evening, that's probably my favorite reading time, but that can also be social, family time, so i don't always get to indulge in that.

what are you reading right now? and what will you read next? will you consult a list?

the gift of NOMA

i got this lovely surprise yesterday in the mail from bloggy (and real life) friend sandra in minnesota. she's not blogging that much these days (facebook has ruined blogging in many ways), but i link you to her blog anyway. i had lamented some time back (undoubtedly on facebook) that the library wanted their copy of NOMA's cookbook back and i was regretfully allowing them that. and now i have a copy of my very own! the photography is stunning and tho' i lack liquid nitrogen in my home kitchen, i am actually going to attempt some of the recipes. i've not actually been to NOMA in copenhagen, which has been crowned the best restaurant in the world the past several years and has 2 michelin stars, but i have been to several restaurants where the chefs were trained there. they've had a huge influence on the food culture of denmark and scandinavia - there's in general much more focus on local and unusual ingredients (hay, for one) than there was before the new nordic food revolution they've led.  i've given the book pride of place on the bookshelf in the living room - with my beaded south african cow standing guard over it (an impulse buy in the airport in cape town). it's a gorgeous book and shouldn't be shut away in the cupboard in the kitchen with the other recipe books. thank you, sandra, it was such a lovely surprise!

surrounded by books

i've invited a group of creative, fabulous women over on friday for an evening of drink & draw. i got the idea from kim (she of the fabulous lampwork beads and findings). i'll make a mess of appetizers that will serve as dinner and we will laugh and drink wine and get out our sketchpads and draw something together.

tho' the house isn't as we ultimately want it to be and in fact, in spots, it's downright embarrassing (did they really have to use seven different ceilings?), i decided i needed this too much to let that stand in my way. so i'm making the best of it - i've rearranged and moved shelves and unpacked a bunch of books that have been boxed for two years. it strikes me that books make things cozy and homey like nothing else and so if i fill the room with books, maybe they won't notice that the radiators don't match.

placing the books on shelves was like getting reacquainted with old friends. i am absolutely convinced that surrounding ourselves with beloved books is good for the soul. i paged through and smiled at titles and memories of classes where i read them or papers i wrote flooded back, until i felt the whole room was coated in a warm blanket of words and the memory of words and thoughts and ideas. and i knew then that it will be all right to have these women over - that i am comfortable being judged by my books, even if i am not my house (yet).

i don't think i'll ever go wholly electronic on the books front, real, actual physical books bring me far too much pleasure for that. i started to try to make a pile of ones i'd be willing to donate and found that i couldn't bring myself to put any of them in that pile. so when the house is renovated, there will just have to be a whole lot of shelves. a life without books is not worth living. and a life surrounded by them is that much better.

top books: how many have you read?

the guardian published a list of the top 100 works of fiction of all time. the list was voted upon by 100 top writers from 54 countries and originally released by the Norwegian Book Club. cervantes' don quixote was voted #1, but the others are just listed in alphabetical order.  i love lists like this, even if they are utterly subjective.

here's the guardian's list (i just lifted it from their website, hence the capital letters)...how many have you read?

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

at 58, i've got a ways to go, tho' i can say that some of them (berlin, alexanderplatz?) probably aren't on my list. and i find murakami to be distinctly missing, but perhaps he was among those who voted. i'm pleased to see no less than 4 dostoevsky - go russians! but really, where is alice in wonderland, shouldn't that be there somewhere? and really, if celan's poems are there, where is pushkin? and bulgakov is clearly missing. and although i liked zorba the greek, does it really belong on this list? damn these lists, they have a way of making me want to make my own.

the things you hold onto

there's no place like home

i've lived away from my country of birth during the whole monica lewinsky thing + the entire bush administration, that's now more than a decade. people always ask me what i miss. and aside from my family, which is a given, i usually say, just The Gap. and i do miss the gap. except when they forget that what they do is make great hooded sweatshirts, but i'm confident they'll remember soon.

but when i think about it, there are other things. like hot rollers. nobody does hot rollers where i live and i'd like to have the occasional curly hair day (that would make my mom happy as well, she always thinks that a look is never really complete if you have flat hair).

and there's the fact that clabber girl baking powder is the best kind. we, of course, have baking powder too, but it's just not the same. however, our yeast (blocks of the fresh kind) totally kicks those wussy dry packets. and mom sends me clabber girl when i need it.

and although ikea now has a form of zip-loc bag available, you can't get that really nice little snack size zip-locs that are ideal for sabin's lunches. so we still import those.

i would say that i let go of other things in stages. for the first couple of years, i imported mentadent toothpaste. i loved that stuff, but now i've gotten used to colgate (because it's available here too) and i no longer need to use up valuable luggage space on that. i'm not even sure they still make it. i think i liked that little push thingie it came in.

i also would lay in a large supply of dry idea deodorant whenever i was home, but now i can deal with whatever's available on the grocery store shelf--rexona or whatever. it really all works equally well. (except when you forget to pack it.)

i miss regular access to vanity fair and atlantic monthly and the new yorker, but perhaps enjoy them more because i only get them once in awhile when i pass through an airport or city that has them, so the pain is less than i would once have imagined.

same with movies. i used to have to see every movie in the theatre on the weekend it came out. now, pretty much the only time i see movies is on a long-haul flight. and i don't miss it, not even a little bit. perhaps my taste has improved or movies have not. but with something like a new james bond, we do still go on opening weekend. (perhaps i should take a lesson from this on the whole getting rid of the t.v. notion.)

some of these are surely products of growing older, but they're also about the adaptability of humans to their surroundings. i have my frustrations with what i at times perceive as the impoliteness of danes, but for the most part, i feel i'm home. it's here my best and favorite people are and our home is filled with memories of our life, even if we use different products than i was once used to.

i think it was B who said it not long ago, home is where your books are. your toothpaste and deodorant, those change. and as you can see, my books are most decidedly here...

WWDD--what would dostoevsky do?

i have dostoevsky on the brain. that can be a dangerous thing to do because having dostoevsky on the brain often makes one manic and slightly febrile. it makes one think outrageous thoughts and do outrageous things. like brutally murder one's landlady. but i don't have a landlady, so no worries on that front. it will no doubt be confined to manically careening from one activity to another around the house today.

i think i got dostoevsky in my head when i reshelved my books last weekend. during college, i had dostoevsky in my head quite a lot. because i majored in russian literature (as one does when one grows up in a small town in south dakota and attends a big ten school in the midwest). there was a point in time when someone would refer to a particular scene in the brothers karamazov and i could turn to the page it was on within seconds. me and the brothers k were totally on intimate terms and i never could decide which brother i loved best--ivan for his cool logical mind, alexei for his goodness or mitya for his mad, slightly febrile careening around--he was probably my favorite, if i'm honest, tho' i previously wrote on this blog that ivan was my favorite. reading that book, i would completely enter the state of mind that was depicted there. it was marvelous and not many authors do that to me. just dostoevsky and murakami and john irving in a widow for one year.

but, what has me thinking about dostoevsky is also the way in which he wrote the brothers k. on tight deadlines, in serial form. publishing it practically as he wrote each chapter (without the aid of spell-check and word and blogger). weaving a complex plot as he went along, but each installment being published in a newspaper, so no revising or going back and adding some new plot element. he was under pressure, eternally in need of money and that manic state of mind he must have himself been in shines through and pulls you in.

imagine what dostoevsky would have done in the blogosphere...

making myself at home

my main weekend activity consisted of painting the low bookshelf seen below which husband brilliantly constructed out of MDF (that shit is heavy) ala handy andy on BBCs changing rooms. and then once it was dry, i got to put books and other fun stuff on it. and we finally got to finish hanging our collection of architectural drawings. my late father-in-law was an architect and he had collected some of them, which we inherited, but we've been picking them up here and there in antique stores for ten years now as well. and now, at last, we have a wall where they can all hang together. the more time i spend in the room, the more i love the turquoise-y teal color we chose for the walls. it somehow brings my molecules into perfect humming alignment. and check out this post for a refresher of how this looked last month and how it looks at the other end of the room.

i had three boxes of books that hadn't been shelved, but instead of putting random odds and ends on these shelves, i went to the shelves in the bedroom and got my best and favorites because they're the books i want near me in this creative space. i also unpacked a box of some of the wonderful things we've collected that i had forgotten about...small brass objects--a compass, an old timeclock that was once used to punch in in an egyptian workplace, a small morse code transmitter found in an antique store in iowa city and our scale collection and a little bitty samovar from tolstoy's yasnaya polyana. getting reacquainted with these long-packed-away things was a bit like having something new. i felt so delighted (and a little bit surprised) unwrapping them from their 18-month old newspapers (yikes!).

and now to the books. i brought out all of the russians...19th century on the bottom left, 20th on the bottom right. my beloved andrei bitov in a place of honor all his own on top right (in original and translation).  homer's odyssey and goethe's faust are allowed to stand next to the 19th century russians. faust because of an extensive paper i once wrote using it together with bulgakov's master & margarita (a highly recommended read, by the way) and homer because of a paper on angelopolous' fantastic film ulysses gaze that i once wrote for a balkan literature course.

and on the top left, my beloved theorists--bakhtin, barthes, kristeva, zizek and the slovenian school (salecl and copjec), plus a bit of lacan (which i didn't feel should be separated from zizek). the little rusty metal horse and bird on the shelves were found in a dingy market in goa and they lend atmosphere to the russians and the theorists.

so, although there's not yet heat in the room--the cute wood-burning stove guy will be coming in the next couple of weeks to install the new wood-burning stove--it's the space i'm most drawn to these days. we heat it up with a little electrical heater and candles and that's actually quite efficient, tho' it is a bit cold out here today because our weather has turned colder. next i have to make window treatments for the six sets of double windows (four of which are actually double doors, which will be gloriously open all summer), finish my fleece-backed cheater quilt (i did finish the top of it that one day that i wanted to, but haven't finished it finished it--i always get stuck on the binding when it comes to quilting), and make a few throw pillows for the couch.

another of the best things about settling it in today was cleaning the floor (both husband and i managed to get a few streaks of that beautiful blue paint here and there on the wood floor) and finding all of our assorted throw rugs. i didn't realize that simple throw rugs could be full of memories. like the main one in the centre, it's one i bought in goa and it's got the perfect shades of blue to go with the walls. and here in front of the couch is a little silk one i bought on my first trip to egypt 12 years ago--it turns out to be the perfect color for this room as well. and then there's the woven one with a picture of houses and mountains that i bought in skopje's old town from an albanian rug seller. it makes me so happy to have all of these history-laden things in one wonderful room. i'm sure that they will whisper to me their stories, nudging me to write them down as they remind me of the good times and they'll be here with us as we create the memories of the future.

reading dangerously in 2009

i'm participating in the estella's revenge 2009 year of reading dangerously. i haven't actually decided which dangerous books to read yet and since i've now had a headache for 24 hours straight, it won't be now that i decide my definitive list, but a couple of those zizek that are languishing on my shelf come to mind, as well as christopher hitchens' god is not great, which i bought awhile ago and haven't yet read.  

there is a great list over on the year of reading dangerously site and perhaps i will pick a few from it as well. but, for now, thinking just hurts too much. man, i hope this headache goes away before it's time to go to that new year's party tomorrow night. especially since i'm making the beef wellington main course.

if any of you have any great suggestions for dangerous reads, do let me know, as i need one dangerous read a month for the next 12 months!

6 meters of books

what do six meters of books look like?  pretty much like this:

but there are still about 3 boxes of books yet to unpack. must build library building next.

too cool!

since i've been waxing philosophical about books and bookshelves of late, i just had to share these awesome bookshelves which i found my way to from magpie musings.  all of the pictures are from jim rosenau's website.

how cool are these?  they're just so clever, funny, whimsical and wonderful that i just might not be able to resist ordering at least a little one for above the kitchen sink.