Gandalf.... is also an oblique self-portrait of his creator. Crucially, Gandalf unravels the identity of Bilbo's Ring by deciphering long-forgotten documents in the royal library in Minas Tirith....
Gandalf finds a forgotten scroll that reveals how the One Ring would have made its way into Gollum's hands. It's a wonder Gandalf didn't stay another year or two in Minas Tirith to prepare a critical edition...
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When (imho) the editor probably should have said: "Why don't we save it for the next book, David. That one can be about fictional places..."
(Don't get me started on the jump from Walcott to Joyce. These profs, just think rules are for other people ???)
...she says that 'considering the total antipathy I had toward matrimony,' the convent was the most honorable decision she could make. She took the veil at age nineteen, despite her fear of routines that 'would limit the freedom of my studies, or the noise of a community that would interfere with the tranquil silence of my books' (97). She did at least get a cell of her own, and she amassed a library of several thousand volumes...
This book should be subtitled 'and add them all to your wishlist.'
Many details in the Nights suggest that the tales as we have them are as much a product of Ottoman-era Cairo and Damascus as of Sassanid Persia or Abbasid Baghdad. Thus in "The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,' when a woman buys a lavish array of supplies for a feast, these include Turkish quinces, Hebron peaches, Damascus lilies, Aleppo raisins, and pastry from Cairo, Turkey, and the Balkans...
The reliefs carved on tomb walls are filled with evocations of earthly life, and their artists took pleasure in capturing a fleeting moment for all eternity. In a relief from the Fifth Dynasty, carved four and a half thousand years ago, a watchman and his guard baboon have caught a thief who is trying to steal some grain. Above the thief's head we see his plea to the guard: 'YAH! Smite your baboon! Get the baboon off me!'
I'm nine books in and I want to pick up eight of them...
pickInspired by Verne‘s Phileas Fogg, yet more of an imaginary journey of reading, it‘s an armchair travelogue to counteract the pandemic‘s restrictions on physical adventuring.
It‘s such a unique take on the ‘books about books‘ genre (my personal catnip),exploring the world through literature, connecting us as humans, through universal emotions, through fictional characters. A true book lovers book, and this would make an amazing reading challenge!
Around the World in 80 Books | 
pan