A blog about books. May include brilliant insights, not-so-brilliant insights, reading lists, articles, quotes, photosets, reviews, and passionate arguments about which Austen man is the dreamiest (Mr Tilney).
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"The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us."
—
F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a 1920 letter (written under quarantine in the south of France during the outbreak of Spanish influenza)
i fucking love marking my books up and underlining lines that make my heart hurt even if the line is crooked or moves into the text a bit, even if i can see it on the back of the page! i love folding down the corners of the pages so i know where the lines that I really love are and i love bracketing off paragraphs that are so good theyre too long to underline every sentence and folding one side of the book back a bit as i read and not being afraid to physically mark MY book up and engage with it and give it all of my love . ultimate move is sharing your annotated and marked up book w someone u love so they can see everything u love in the book and its like… intimate
Curiosity. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes “concern”; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent “bad” information from invading and suffocating the “good.” Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibilities of coming and goings.
