Sagacity.

A journalists book blog: A Book Blog's Give Away

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:42:49 -0400

A journalists book blog: A Book Blog's Give Away:

I’m doing this mostly just cuz, but I’m also celebrating 1,100 followers!! So yay to all of you!! This is is my much love celebration.

OK. Here are the rules!

You can reblog this as many times as you want before April 30.

You have to be following me, I will check.

There will be two…

aseaofquotes: George Orwell, 1984 Submitted by scholarmade.

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:42:34 -0400

aseaofquotes:

George Orwell, 1984

Submitted by scholarmade.

Matilda was hands down my favourite book as a child, because its...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:32:26 -0400

Matilda was hands down my favourite book as a child, because its heroine had characteristics with which I could identify (not the telekinesis, I wish though), and because it cemented for me my love for everything Roald Dahl. I came across this wonderful article by Chelsey Philpot recently, and was blown away- she sums up everything I feel about Dahl and his books extraordinarily eloquently. The book celebrates its 25^th anniversary this month, and I can’t help feel a sense of pride on behalf of my favourite fictitious heroine. She’s changed her appearance on books over the years (my personal Matilda will always look the way Quentin Blake drew her), and she’s appeared in a film and on Broadway, but she is as relevant, if not more relevant, today than ever before.

In her article, Ms. Philpot says something that strikes me as scary-

For my job as a children’s book-reviews editor, I’ve read more novels and picture books for kids than anyone above the age of 10 can justify. On my bookshelves, Silverstein is squashed between Frost and Lorca. Given what crosses my desk these days, I doubt that Matilda would make it out of many an editor’s slush pile in the current publishing climate. It goes against too many rules: It’s a hard sell to get 9-year-olds interested in a 5-year-old protagonist; the first quarter of the book is episodic; and Matilda doesn’t even have supernatural power until Page 165. (Would readers have waited that long for Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson to realize he’s a demigod?)

What she says is frighteningly true, and nobody would know better about children’s literature than a children’s book-reviews editor, but I like to think Dahl would be have been incredibly successful today if he were still around. The thing that makes his books so very distinct is that they are so cleverly written, readable for a hopeless 8 year old me, and even more so to a much more well-read 17 year old me.

Thank you, Mr. Dahl, for single-handedly creating the hunger I have now for literature. And thank you Matilda, for teaching me that I am not alone.

Photo

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:36:04 -0400

incidentalcomics: Creative Blocks

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:55:08 -0400

incidentalcomics:

Creative Blocks

"Deep rivers run quiet."

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:00:18 -0400

“Deep rivers run quiet.”

- Haruki Murakami (via ambling)

"As soon as Caesar took his seat, the conspirators crowded round him as if to pay their respects...."

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:40:35 -0400

“As soon as Caesar took his seat, the conspirators crowded round him as if to pay their respects. Tillius Cimber, who had taken the lead, came up close, pretending to ask a question. Caesar made a gesture to put off his request to some other time, but Cimber caught hold of his toga at both shoulders. ‘This is outrageous,’ Caesar exclaimed, and at that moment one of the Casca brothers stabbed him from one side just below the throat. Caesar grasped Casca’s arm and ran it through with his stylus. He was leaping up when another dagger caught him in the chest. Confronted by a ring of drawn daggers, he drew the top of his toga over his face, and at the same time with his left hand drew the lap of his toga down to his feet, so that he would die decently, with the lower part of his body covered. Twenty three dagger thrusts went home. Caesar did not utter a sound after the first blow, though some have recorded that when he saw Marcus Brutus coming at him, he said ‘kai su, teknon’ [Greek for ‘you too, child’]”

- Julius Caesar was assassinated on this day in 44 BC. (via explore-blog)

etsy: Brooke Schmidt’s lovely pieced poems, made from words cut...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:36:53 -0400

etsy:

Brooke Schmidt’s lovely pieced poems, made from words cut from old books.

okuma-gunlugum: Konulu kitap ayraçları. (İllüstrasyon: Ethem...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:50:54 -0400

okuma-gunlugum:

Konulu kitap ayraçları. (İllüstrasyon: Ethem Onur Bilgiç)

via: http://www.fikr-et.com/41614/512337/ne-yapt/bookmarks

Take a minute to watch this adorable little girl meet her baby...

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:32:32 -0400

Take a minute to watch this adorable little girl meet her baby sister for the first time, and upon seeing the baby’s distress, assures her she’s ‘okay’. There really is a profound, beautiful kind of joy you extract when you watch as she gives her sister advice that I think we all need once in a while: her amusement and delight is just absolutely precious.

gorgonetta: wordsbydan: 7 Great quotes about libraries on...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:55:00 -0500

gorgonetta:

wordsbydan:

7 Great quotes about libraries on photos of beautiful libraries

With libraries around the world in danger of extinction, Flavorwire posted a series of great quotes about libraries from famous writers. I decided to pair them with some of the world’s most beautiful libraries. You’re welcome;

Trinity College Library - University of Dublin

University Club Library – New York City

Admont Abbey Library – Austria

Real Gabinete Português de Leitura – Rio de Janeiro

Suzzalo Library at the University of Washington – Seattle

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Canadian Library of Parliament – Ottawa

Click on the photo to see it full size. Support your local library, kids.

This is a wonderful set. I wish United States-based public library administrators and zeitgeist-setters would pay special attention to the Bradbury and Twain quotes. The dumbing-down and de-archiving of public library collections in this country is making it harder for someone to use the library to give themselves an education in anything beyond pop culture, current news, and what it takes to be a good employee (not a good thinker, or a good person, or a good citizen), and is rapidly eroding our collective memory.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! (March 2, 1904 – September 24,...

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 05:15:00 -0500

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

(March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991)

Theodor Seuss Geisel, best known as Doctor Seuss, was born 109 years ago in Springfield, Massachusetts. Son of German immigrants, he is best known for his profound impact on children’s literature, with immortal books such as The Cat in the Hat, The Lorax, and Green Eggs and Ham. His contribution to the world of literature will never be forgotten.

Your piece on summer, and the dragon flies was awesome! I can't wait to read more!

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:47:14 -0500

I’m glad you enjoyed it! Thank you so much (:

The Dragonflies When the dragonflies arrived, we knew it was...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 11:52:00 -0500

The Dragonflies

When the dragonflies arrived, we knew it was summer. They would skim lightly over the freshly mown grass and we’d know that finally it was time for beaches and popsicles and the glorious sun. I was, however, never a summer person. I did not enjoy any weather that was happier than my mood, and this resulted in me only being content in the sternest of winters, where the thunder echoed my mind’s thoughts and the cold, biting air felt much like my sarcastic and cynical soul. My friends however, were more than pleased about the onset of dragonflies. They’d (metaphorically) burn their sweaters and stockings and put on cotton tops and denim cutoffs and flip flops, and happily toast outside. It was a time for picnics and lemonade and merriment.

Georgiana’s death put quite a damper on this weather, as one could imagine. Though people carried on as if nothing had ever really happened, her silent shadow followed us to ever amusement park, beach and park we went to. She was a quiet sort of girl, who never really got along with the rest of us for reasons we realized after she’d passed nobody knew. She had been struck down with a heavy fever one day, and I only knew this because my mother was close friends with her mother’s older sister. One day she was burning with temperature and after a few days it got so bad she was sweating and trembling all at the same time. Nobody could place how exactly a healthy girl had fallen so ill, but on a Wednesday morning when school ended for the rest of us, she took her final breath.

I was not close to George, in fact, nobody ever was. She was the kind of person who seemed to prefer her own company, and she’d always look perfectly happy wrapped up in a book of some sort. She’d look at people as if to say, do not disturb me. I’d tried a couple of times to initiate something with her: I was well known as the black sheep of our grade and I supposed that we would get along, but she would always end the conversation short. After a while, I just stopped trying. Everyone had accepted that she came in peace, so she was never bullied or spoken to abhorrently. She was just George, the quiet thing that nobody knew.

The only people she got along famously with were preschoolers. She’d spend most of her break times helping primary teachers, be it taking the children out to the playground or helping them with their latest crafts project. She’d be there when the secondary had holidays too, I knew because I’d have to pick my little brother up after he was done. He’d tell me all sorts of stories about ‘Georgie’ and I’d be surprised to hear them because she never sounded like the same person in his tales. This girl was funny and kind and had much to say about a lot. When my brother had spoken out of his turn once in the kids’ ‘listening circle’, she’d taken him out of class and very gravely pointed to her ears saying- D’you know why they’re so small? Because I never listened when I was a kid like you. And now I can barely hear anything anyone says to me.

My brother takes after me, and was pretty cynical at first, but apparently she kept up the act of never being able to hear him talk, and now he listens like a lamb before deciding whether or not he wants to interject.

One day we were all sitting on the beach inspecting each other’s tongues (we’d just had popsicles in the most eccentric of colours) when Mark brought it up.

“Her parents, they’re the ones that really kill me,” he said, and I pardoned his double entendre, because he was right. Her parents wandered everywhere like ghosts: their house had the shutters permanently down and their lawn desperately needed mowing. Whenever you walked past it, you’d swear you could feel a chill.

“It shouldn’t have happened that way,” said another girl, Lucy. “Nobody deserves to see their children die”

“I just can’t imagine someone dying so quickly of a fever like that,” I remarked casually, but this statement was taken in a very serious way.

“Do you suspect it was something else then, Ana?”, Mark said, and suddenly I was aware of several faces turned to me.

I shrugged. The sun was setting, and there was a strange salty breeze in the air.

“It’s possible,” I said.

For a minute we all sat around just pondering the gravity of what I’d just said. We were all thinking one thing- was it suicide? George had never looked unhappy, but nobody really knew what went on under that calm exterior. We could never really know, could we? She’d closed herself off to the world before it seemed like she ever really gave it a chance, she’d flitted through classrooms without being seen or heard. She’d read books by authors like Sylvia Plath and Anais Nin and Margaret Atwood and nobody could tell what she was thinking. Would things have been different if she’d let herself be seen? A young girl, shut off completely, a work of fiction in a world that was so very real.

The dragonflies kept coming back, though summer was never quite the same.

"Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst upon me and I will..."

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:33:28 -0500

“Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I’ll laugh. And then I’ll know what life is.”

- Sylvia Plath, who took her life 50 years ago today, writing at the age of 18. (via explore-blog)

The 11th of February marks a sad day in the history of...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 08:54:55 -0500

The 11^th of February marks a sad day in the history of literature- the 50^th death anniversary of the incredible Sylvia Plath. Plath was well known for her breath taking poetry, and a month before she killed herself she published her stunning, semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Plath’s suicide made her somewhat immortal, as well as a figure of much romanticism by the public. Much controversy still surrounds her suicide and life, and she remains an author as relevant and important as she was when she was first published.

Lena Dunham says it best- “I wonder if Plath would have been saved had she been born in a different time: in a time when psycho-pharmacologists are no more shameful to visit than hairdressers and women write celebrated personal essays about being bad mothers and cutters and are reclaiming the word slut. Would she have been a riot grrrl, embracing an angry feminist aesthetic? Addicted to Xanax? A blogger for Slate? Would she, like me, have found a cosy coffeehouse environment on the internet, a way to connect with people who understood her aesthetic and validated her experience? Would she have been less dependent on the approval of viewers and critics and more aware of the positive effect her book was having on splintered psyches and girls with short bangs everywhere? Or would that kind of connectedness and access to unmitigated and misspelled negativity have driven her even madder?…. Sylvia was just like us. Only she didn’t have The Bell Jar.”

We miss you, Sylvia.

"After all we are a world of imitations; all the Arts that is to say imitate as far as they can the..."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:22:28 -0500

“After all we are a world of imitations; all the Arts that is to say imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see. Such is the eternal instinct in the human beast, to try & reproduce something of that majesty in paint marble or ink.”

- 17-year-old Virginia Woolf on nature, imitation and the arts (via explore-blog)

Reading Hemingway

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:17:01 -0500

Reading Hemingway

200 years ago today, Jane Austen’s well- loved Pride and...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:10:00 -0500

200 years ago today, Jane Austen’s well- loved Pride and Prejudice was published. Austen wrote the book between October 1796 and August 1797, and started it when she was staying with her brother and his wife in Kent. Her father sent the manuscript to Thomas Cadell, hoping for it to be seen, but the offer was declined- Austen then sold the copyright for the novel to Thomas Egerton of Whitehall in exchange for just a 110 pounds. He then published the first edition of Pride and Prejudice in three hardcover volumes on 27 January 1813.

Did Austen know she was writing a book that was to remain for centuries in the future? Did she know that she would be studied and admired by students and scholars, that her protagonist would be a role model for young girls and her hero the archetype of an ideal man? I highly doubt it. But she wrote anyways- doing it because she had something to say about the society she was in at the time- one where women were expected to be docile and men charismatic.

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Picture credits to Studio Robin

awritersruminations: Happy Birthday Virginia Woolf (25 January...

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 03:43:34 -0500

awritersruminations:

Happy Birthday Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941)