I knew, we knew, that what we were experiencing was anything but the grand historical event, the vain, colossal judicial spectacle that we all had good reason to fear at the beginning. No: this was something else: a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity and presence. It was only very late in the day that I realised that the white box resembles a modern church, and that something sacred had been taking place there.
----
Image: BBC news site

What would the new normal look like? The windows and doors would be suddenly thrown open and humanity would totter back out into the world, hesitant at first. He imagined euphoric crowds taking to the streets and impromptu carnivals as people embraced with joy. But he would not be one of them.
‐------
I'd not realised this was a #Pandemic novel.

Tempting...

Have picked up the usual winter bug from work. I am consoling myself with looking at lovely new penguins.

Dear #Peirene, please come north, thanking you...
https://www.peirenepress.com/

Adding the paperback to the wishlist, even if there isn't a cover yet! One I think I'll want to read again.

She reviewed three books a week for a year, and continued to make occasional contributions until 1933....Parker's column helped to establish the New Yorker voice; wry, puckish, world-weary.

On a book she was finding hard to finish: "One of us, we know, is not functioning properly, and we dare not hope in our inferiority that it is the author".

That was the summer when we discovered that we were surrounded by colourful creatures that only our phone cameras could reveal....

All around the world, crowds gathered, armed with phones, to hunt Pokémon. In the end, technology not only condemned us to live in the isolation of a virtual world, it also allowed us to be closer to one another. Body to body. Jorge went out hunting for Pokémon and I went out hunting for men.

Frieda said, "Don't make me laugh, it hurts." She was so sick.

Shelly began to make a real dent in the stack of old Time magazines in the doctor's waiting room. She kept asking him if her mother was dying, and he couldn't really say. "Well, is she living?" she asked once, and he couldn't answer that either.

Beautifully illustrated short book summarising Rie's life, with photographs of Rie's covetable work.

By the time the design was complete...engineers... still believed they were employing a tried-and-tested joint for their new rocket: they had avoided any potentially dangerous innovation. But this was a convenient delusion.... in creating a man-rated, fail-safe joint they had also modified it so extensively that what they produced was, in effect, a quite new and experimental design.

----
Cue the ominous soundtrack...

But what was really flummoxing the six males around the table were symmetrical marks under the breasts of the three victims shown in the photographs spread out in front of them.

Were they something the killer had done? A signature maybe that investigators could follow ....
Finally...."Jana, what do you think?"

...."it looks to me like these are the marks you get after you've been wearing an underwire bra all day...?

"Why are you interrupting my bird watching?"

Current library reads with one I just completed (The Mighty Red).

After our son was born, I asked her why she didn't get a new Ethiopian passport so she could travel to Europe to visit her grandson. "It's that easy, you think. I get an Ethiopian passport and then go wherever I want? No. How long do you want to stay? How much money do you have? Why do you want to come here? I'm not going to go beg some country to let me in. They want to make you feel like a thief for traveling but look at them...

Not loving this font.

Great weather for staying inside and reading...

Donoso's house was searched by a group of national police agents. They turned it all upside down and broke some furniture but they didn't take anything. Donoso couldn't sleep at night, afraid that a squad would come any minute and take his diaries, his comics, his parents.

Fuenzalida hears the footsteps of the crowd advancing with flags and banners. They fill streets, cross bridges, walk on endlessly....

Detail from 'The decorated opening of Ippolita's copy of Cicero's treatise on old age, written by her aged 14, and bearing her motto, emblem and an abbreviated form of her name; Milan, 1458: Add MS 21984, f. 3r.'
From essay "Ippolita Sforza, A Renaissance Education" Calum Cockburn. "Ippolita Maria (d. 1488) was a noblewoman born into the influential Sforza family, then rulers of the duchy of Milan..."

From "Shajar al-Durr, Sultan of Egypt by Shazia Jagot" essay/ chapter.

"Shajar al-Durr an epithet meaning "Tree of Pearls was the first Mamluk sultan and woman ruler to reign across Egypt and Syria."

For several weeks, Max and the rest of the little group made themselves as comfortable as they could in the cellar of a burned-out house. ... they waited for word that they could cross [the Russian border]. The Broido girl spent the days reading popular French novels that she found in the house. Many years later, she could not forget the strange contrast between the abandoned streets outside and the book-lined rooms of the empty house...

A medieval ale seller!

In February 1477, at the village of Topcroft in Norfolk, Margery Brews dictated a letter to her suitor John Paston III, calling him her 'right well-beloved valentine' and expressing the depth of her love. While John's reply to Margery does not survive, her words form the oldest known Valentine's letter in English.... (From the chapter by Calum Cockburn)

"Satan instructing a group of witches in sorcery, from The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man; England, 15th century: Cotton MS Tiberius A VII/1, f. 70r"

"St Clare and a group of nuns mourning St Francis of Assisi, from The Life and Miracles of St Francis of Assisi; Freiburg, 1478: Add MS 15710, f. 184v."

Reminds me of Lucie Attwell!

"An anchoress entering her cell, from a Pontifical including an order for the enclosure of anchoresses; England, 15th century: Lansdowne MS 451, f. 76v."

"The author Christine de Pizan instructing her son, from 'The Book of the Queen'; Paris, c. 1410-14: Harley MS 4431/2, f. 261v."

Colophon of Estellina Conat, from her printed edition of Jedaiah Ben Abraham Bedersi's Behinat ha-'Olam; Mantua, 1476-80

The first known female Hebrew printer/ typesetter and one of the first known female printers in any language.

Thank goodness we had Facebook to show us that, regardless of the dreams we may have cherished, we all ended up the same, old and fat, too bitter about the small defeats life had handed us, too opinionated, quarrelsome, alone.

🫠Guess this isn't the new marketing slogan for FB...

This has been waiting on my shelves for ages! Time to pick it up and read.

As she experimented with memoir, biography, and novels that contained elements of each, [Woolf] noticed that the process by which events are converted into history is inevitably distorting, for the past acquires in the telling a shape and coherence that is absent from the present. It's an observation that she expressed sharply when she came to write of her brother's death...

....the exercises [water survival drills] were conducted under the gaze of dozens of reporters and cameramen...

By now, each of the women understood that the novelty of being America's first female astronauts made them a focus of attention, but their patience was already fraying....

when, as she was being winched aloft by a helicopter, a photographer asked Sally Ride to make a "happy face" for the cameras, she simply yelled, "No!"

I could hear the water lapping almost at my heels, a flood tide rushing to glut the river. It rises and it falls, that flood, and in time it will have the barbastrelle and the brown-eared bat; it will have the Oak Eggar and the Garden Tiger; it will have the peregrine and the clattering jacks.

Slight story of a Japanese woman having a midlife crisis with lots of books. A bit frustrating as it's essentially a list of tempting books you can't read unless you speak Japanese, but I guess that's a sign the book has worked.

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...

🤣

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.'

... now I was certain. I'd glanced at the right-hand side of the shelving unit when I'd been fetching tinder for the fire chamber, and somehow I'd saved the image in my mind.

There they were.

The 'bumlets' the squares of linen to keep the benches clean and stop your bum being singed by the hot wood.

....The pile was lower than it should have been.

---
I had no idea this was a thing.
Every day a school day.

"Every reader of Singer is at home in Krochmalna Street, the heart of Warsaw‘s Jewish neighborhood, where the author lived from 1908 to 1917 and where he set many of his books. When you read Singer, Krochmalna becomes the center of the world. The feeling is even more powerful because the street now exists only in these texts... and a few black-and-white photos..."

https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/the-underbelly-of-krochmalna-street/

"We all have our turn in the end," I said....

She took a deep breath. "Well, I suppose if we die tonight, I'm okay with it. I've had a good life, you know. I was married to Kenneth for over thirty years. Eighteen of them were really happy. That's not so bad."

"What happened to the other twelve?"

"Erectile dysfunction and his abortive attempt to breed Weimaraners."

Well, this is news to me...

He hadn't mentioned the postmortem oblivion, though. He assumed they knew about that, how comedians almost never reached posterity, how quickly the material aged, and the delivery, how a comedian dead twenty years might as well have lived in the Middle Ages, might as well have been one of those court jesters about whom the only thing we remembered was the funny hats.

"Vague isn't necessarily bad,' he said. 'It mirrors the human experience.'

How was this guy allowed to teach English? Dorothy wondered.....

'Good writing is supposed to transcend human experience,' she said, 'not just mirror it. Otherwise, all I would have to do for critics to call my next show a masterpiece would be to write an hour's worth of random words, and I would get blurbs like "Astounding! Just like life! Makes no sense at all!"

Ride on! ride on in majesty! / In lowly pomp ride on to die. Or, Thou, most kind and gentle death, / Waiting to hush our latest breath, / O praise him, alleluia! It perplexed Evelyn that there was such a mismatch between the lurid passionate words of the hymns and the tame chit-chat of the congregation at the end of services, when any mention of death - or for that matter lowly pomp, or even riding - would have seemed jarring and excessive.

100 Notable African Books of 2024 from #BrittlePaper
https://brittlepaper.com/100-notable-african-books-of-2024/

Only 100 pages into this chunkster. So glad I didn't wait for work to close for the hols to crack this one open!

I'm having a bit of a good run at the moment. I bought this a while back thinking I'd save it to read. A lovely distraction, beautiful, thoughtful prose and so many art and music references to check out.

From over there is a sound of argument, from over there a clamor of complaint, from over there a gospel choir, from over there the muezzin's call, from over there three or four sputtering generators, from over there the squall of the bus stop and taxi stand, from over there revelers and water sellers, from over there the neighbor's relentless television... a vast sonic mix of an ocean that beats its incessant waves the whole night through...

Think instead, he says to himself, of all the people in the Medina Koura, think of them in their homes, in their beds, think of their quotidian worries about their children's schooling. Think about their secret savings, and their delightful subterfuges, their religion and transgressions, their necessary severity, the warmth of their families, and the untranslatable consolations of their lives.

Lovely exhibit, so many beautiful books to look at... plus plenty in the shop too!