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Ina

@inaeclecticreader

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‘I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.’
📖🎧
#readersincurrentreads

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Enjoying the @oldskoolchallengeclub ?
It’s so interesting to see the different criteria used for the same prompts.

I love how many of these posts are appearing in my feed, and I have found new readers to follow through the shortlist for last week’s challenges.

While I jotted down a few options for #datewithabook , I’m starting Week 3 with Dee’s challenge: the #lowercasetitlestack @chapter1.page1

Stretch challenge: Can twelve lower case titles be used in one long sentence for #twelvebooksontuesday ?
Not really, but it was fun to try!

all that’s left unsaid about the everlasting sunday is that the strays, representing the alphabet of light and dark and heartless(ness), climbed out of their holes after the rain and lit little fires everywhere, because theory & practice says, apples never fall past the shallows; gravity is the thing.

Greatest design curiosity?
How the author’s name is presented alongside the lower case titles.

What do you think looks best? First Letters, ALL CAPS or all lower case? 🔠🔡

I have tagged five book friends from my early days of Bookstagram whose posts I miss seeing appear in my feed.

#oldskoolchallengeclub #hereforthefunnotthenumbers

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Explore my TBR shelves with me! 🔎 I’m highlighting some of my unread books in a series of #tenonmytbr posts, alphabetically by author. ✨ Join me!

Here are ten books written by authors with I names. Plus Italian ceramics.* 📸 Which one do you think I should read first?

🎭 Ibsen’s Plays by Henrik Ibsen (The Master Builder, The Wild Duck, Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler, Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, The League of Youth, Ghosts, Rosmersholm, John Gabriel Borkman, An Enemy of the People)

🥶 Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason

🌫️ Into Oblivion by Arnaldur Indridason

🔍 The Michael Innes Treasury by Michael Innes (The Case of the Journeying Boy, Hamlet, Revenge!, Appleby’s End)

🐖 Trying to Save Piggy Sneed by John Irving

✍🏻 The Sketch Book by Washington Irving

🇩🇪 The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

🌞 Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

🏮 When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

👮🏻‍♂️ Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo

I had to double up on some of these authors because there aren’t a lot of writers with I names.

I tagged a few to play along. ✨ If you see this and it looks like fun, please share your TBR stacks. Get creative if you don’t have 10 of any letter. Fewer books, combine letters, use letters of the titles instead, whatever. It’s supposed to be fun!

* My mom and sister had an Italian ceramic import/retail business for decades called Dieci Soli. I caught the collector bug from them. These pieces are all vintage, not theirs, but I have plenty of theirs as well.

#bookstagramchallenge #TBR #readersofig #bookcommunity

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Another quietly beautiful read from a Japanese writer.

They usually don’t mean it as a compliment when they label something as a hit-or-miss. When they do, they consider it an affliction, a flaw. Merriam-Webster says it is when something is “marked by a lack of care, forethought, system or plan.”

So I heard some people say @kawakami_mieko ‘s All The Lovers In The Night is one such work.

I think everything is a hit or a miss. Not intrinsically, of course. My view is, it all depends on the one on the receiving end. Either we relate to something, or we don’t. On that basis, there are no universally acclaimed products, no inherently, absolutely virtuous works. Just things that speak to us, and some things that fail to resonate.

All The Lovers sang me a gentle, soothing lullaby. Every time I opened it I perceived its faint glow, felt its soothing warmth.

A book on reluctance. It makes no pretense about its ambitions. If it were a song, it certainly is not an anthem that’s made to rock the arena. It is more of the acoustic ballad the singer plays to a hushed crowd, stage lights dimmed, instrument volumes turned down low. Lovers does not fly you across the vast expanse of the human experience’s infinity, but its precisely-honed point cuts deep.

It tells of a reserved, introverted proofreader who’s increasingly becoming an emerging alcoholic getting deeply fascinated with light and finding herself dismantling a few emotional barriers to let in the possibility of her finally experiencing a little bit of what it means to love.

Of course, that’s an oversimplification. As is my tendency, whenever I attempt to capture lightning in a bottle.

Why is it a hit, and not a miss, for me? Because I think I too have experienced not too long ago this kind of fascination with light. And by grace or fortune, I believe it has gone quite a bit well for me.

Incidentally. Fortuitously. Or perhaps according to some grander design, the light I’ve been enchanted with, the one that has illuminated my life and my worldview, the one that has vanquished the darkness, the one that now lights my path, is celebrating her birthday today.

We are lovers tonight. As is in all other days. 🌙

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As luck would have it, I came in completely blind: I neither checked any review nor considered the summary at the back. Free from any expectations and preconceptions, I went in without reservation and was utterly impressed with every turn of an eventful page, with every consequential chapter. Here is a facet of Woolf I haven’t encountered before, a style so fresh and so unexpected, and yet the message throughout seemed so uncannily familiar: what an inspired woman can consistently achieve if she has had the same facilities, privileges, benefits, freedoms, and support as those unremittingly held and enjoyed by a man. It is so convincingly clear when it is Woolf that proclaims the moral: skirts could be oppressive. Let her choose her husband, let her manage her estate, let her pursue her vocation. Let her drive her car.

Virginia Woolf, you are a star.

Considered as the most accomplished prose love letter in all of modern literature, Orlando was written for Virginia’s lover, the lady Vita Sackville-West. Scholars label it a “mock” biography of a man-turned-woman English noble that spans more than 300 hundred years; starts during the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1 and ends with airplanes hovering over London. It playfully denounces those tinged with patriarchy—Shakespeare and Pope and Swift and critics and lawyers and suitors, in court and in bed alike. There is fantasy, there is commentary, there is stream of consciousness, there is British Literature, the gloom and chill of London, there is the quiet beauty of the English countryside. There is poetry and childbirth. There is no remorse.

I’ve always thought that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a divinely-inspired original. That was, until I encountered Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. But here is Orlando. Written at the same time as Wilder’s opus. The styles are similar. Men do not have the monopoly on claiming to have conceived that historical fiction can be spiced with magical realism. Exercise caution when claiming anything at all.

Woolf is singular, Woolf is sharp, Woolf is relentless, Woolf is unforgiving, Woolf is uncompromising, Woolf is divine.

This is my fourth Woolf. It only keeps getting better.

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Happy Monday, friends! I’m so sorry for the late discussion post for Lois the Witch. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was so absorbed in the Texas Rangers vs Houston Astros game yesterday that I completely forgot to post. 🙈😆
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Anyway, how is everyone doing after reading Lois the Witch? I had SO many thoughts and questions after I finished. It was very hard only choosing 7 things to discuss.
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Here’s some quick history about the story and then feel free to add comments or questions to mine in the discussion comments.
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Elizabeth Gaskell takes us to America in this novella, and places the reader into the tragic historical events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693. One could read this story simply as a fictionalized account of the witch trials, but I think it’s more interesting to entertain the idea that Gaskell sought to be instructive through her novella. What, you may ask, would the Salem witch trials of 1692 have in common with Gaskell’s 1859 England? For one, revival was sweeping England during that period, and Calvinism - and the belief in predestination - was popular again. Another commonality would have been the prevalence of superstitious beliefs and obsession with the supernatural. Gaskell herself offers warnings to her 19th century readers throughout her story, and seems to present her story as an instructive work. Finally, some scholars believe that Gaskell was pushing back against the Victorian idea that women are inherently “hysterical”, and she “refutes the widespread Victorian belief that hysteria is ‘natural’ for women, a symptom of their vulnerable bodies and minds.” (Deborah Wynne).
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There was more we could have discussed if this were a different platform, so maybe I’ll get a blog post up one day for further discussion.
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I can’t wait to hear everyone’s thoughts on this story!

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Hi fellow readers! I’m so sorry for the delayed discussion post. I was attending a conference that was wonderful, but it left me with little time for creating discussion questions. 😆
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Anyway, I don’t know about you but I’m loving the gothic atmosphere that Gaskell successfully created in the first two stories. There were parallels to the Bronte sisters (isolation, abusive men, etc), but Gaskell uses terror in a way the Brontes shied away from. There are SO many things to discuss with both stories that I had the hardest time narrowing down discussion questions to ask. I’ll place the questions in the comments, feel free to discuss as many as you like by responding to the comments, or don’t comment at all - no expectations or judgments on participation here! 😉
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p.s. if you don’t have time for the discussion, please feel free to share which story this week was your favorite!

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Lovely @thebookishvalentine tagged me to show ten books I would like to read before the end of the year. So, this is my #tenbeforetheend stack, some recently acquired books, some books that have been on my list for a while.
Happy to be reading Jude and Shirley for #victober I will try to finish This Other Eden and Study for Obedience before Booker winner is announced in November. Excited to continue reading Pulitzer winners with The Sympathizer, say hi to some old friends ( Ford, Franzen and Undset ) and tackle my first Starnone!

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#bookstack #bookstackattack #knjige #reading #bookstagramfeature
#bookstagrammer #reader #lovereading #bookstagram #read #readeveryday
#unitedbookstagram #whatiread #booklove
#bookscoffeelifestyle #allthebooks #bookworld #bibliophile #booklover #bookaddict #bookishlove #fortheloveofreading #booknerd

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“Every library (a sum of books constituted by a non-professional reader for their own pleasure and daily use) answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways.”

“In practice books can be assembled just about anywhere.”

Hilarious. I thought Perec (1978) was serious. Turns out, tongue in cheek. “It is extremely rare to find books in a bathroom, even though for many people this is a favorite place to read in. The surrounding humidity is unanimously considered a prime enemy of the conservation of printed texts. At the most, you may find in a bathroom a medicine cupboard and in the medicine cupboard a small work titled ‘What to do before the doctor gets there.’”

“Things which aren’t books but are often met within libraries”—“photographs in gilded brass frames, dried flowers in stemmed glasses, pepper and mustard from Lufthansa, scale models of vintage cars, multicolored pebbles and gravel”, + postcards from Exes, pens from hotels, various paperweight, trinkets, keychains, oddities (from Phnom Penh or Harajuku) and juvenalia.

Describing further our “small-minded temptation towards an individual bureaucracy”, he distinguishes between stable classifications from provisional ones when grouping books together, the latter defined as those supposed to last only a few days, the time it takes for a book to discover, or rediscover, its definitive place in a library, including books that you’ve borrowed or were lent to you so they’re not yours and they are a foreign object to your shelves (if you’re conscientious) so you don’t know where to put them and you’ve promised several times to give them back etc.

There are books very easy to arrange (Penguin Blacks/Eau de Nils), not too difficult to arrange (Murakami, CoHo, Didion), books just impossible to arrange (Sports Illustrated Bikini photobooks, Think and Grow Rich [maybe that’s easy—read it once and give it away], Mark Z. Danielewski, The Elements of Style [because you’re not supposed to keep it shelved, you must carry it around with you everywhere, damn it]), and books that belong only to the kitchen, i.e., cookbooks.

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This trend is going around and it’s so fun that I had to do it! Very curious to see how similar our book taste is! I’ve listed some of my favorite books, all you need to do is use the points system listed below to tally up how many we have in common and let me know what your points total is.

Here's the point system:
10 points for any books you've read
5 points for any books you're currently reading
2 points for any books on your TBR
1 point for any books you DNF

Ten books:
Foster
Fifth Business
The Transit of Venus
My Antonia
Pride and Prejudice
Anna Karenina
Villette
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
My Name is Asher Lev
Home

How many points did you get?

@thebookishvalentine thanks for the idea💛

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#floralfriday #bookstack #knjige #reading #bookstagramfeature
#bookstagrammer #reader #lovereading #bookstagram #read #readeveryday
#unitedbookstagram #whatiread #booklove #booksandflowers
#bookscoffeelifestyle #allthebooks #bookworld #bibliophile #booklover #bookaddict #bookishlove #fortheloveofreading #booknerd

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Officially the 2nd absolute most charming quick read of all time for me (behind The Little Prince, of course.)

If you have an hour or two in your life to spare. Please don’t miss out on this one. Especially if you love books and looking for books and you like establishing relationships with the people involved in that endeavor. If you’re the type that finds respect and humanity and experiencing a personal touch in your commercial transactions—be it you being on the service side or the receiving end— as matters of not a trivial importance, then this is the book for you.

A love letter to all booksellers out there, especially the tiny, independent ones. Thank you for everything that you do. May you never lose your compass.

My friends, you know me, I am a big tagger. I wanted to tag all you beautiful souls who recommended this book to me or have urged me to pick this up as my next read. But please allow me to dedicate this post to the lovely booksellers who have been taking care of me and ensuring that I am able to pursue my love affair with books in a most sincere manner, full of integrity, possessed of a genuine concern for the booklover and the objects of their devotion.

So thank you to my favorites: @blithebooksindependent , @_fullybooked , @page394books , @bookulaw , @cicero.and.co.books , @pageandturnerph , @justinbooks_ @ifybooks9 , @thebookduke , @bookwormica , @brighterbooks.ph @cathatterbookshop , @librodega , @goldbooks , @lalabookbyaleph , and all the other kindly indie sellers I have had the privilege to buy from throughout the years. You are all valued and treasured. If ever I find myself in the Senate I will make sure to propose legislation providing certain tax breaks and industry protection for booksellers. But that’s never going to happen. I mean me being in any sort of public position. But certainly I will be buying more books from you, and I hope you’ll continue to be as accommodating and patient as you’ve always been.

Keep doing what you do. Thank you.

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“Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I'm a monster on the hill
Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city
Pierced through the heart, but never killed”

Yes, a masterpiece.

I mean, this is what they call a tour de force. Written in the style of Gogol and Flaubert. Almost felt like I wasn’t reading a book from 1985 but a classic from 1785. Fun, witty, alive.

Take the idea of writing a novel about a man’s life. The protagonist has one (almost supernatural) talent: his sense of smell. Build the narrative around that concept. Süskind never ran out of adjectives and nouns to describe or identify anything related to scent. As in never.

So well-researched it was astounding. Those novels like LifeofPi (zoo animals), BloodMeridian (desert, wild west), EnglishPatient (desert; renaissance), GrapesoWrath (vehicles) where the author seems to go on forever on something where they seem to be the world’s foremost SME. Süskind was a virtuoso in writing about the alchemy of perfumery and scent-making.

Mix in the plot: Grenouille’s psychology. His value system, his heart’s desire. His life story and the people he encounters. The murders.

That’s a novel worthy of anyone’s top ten of all time.

Except I won’t. I cannot.

All reviews are idiosyncratic. All likes are based on preference. And the person that I am couldn’t adore Perfume for one thing—its abject lack of justice.

The moralist and idealist in me, the Kantian dwarf that resides in the crevices of my heart, is unable to fall in love with this book because it has utterly deprived me of any satisfaction. All brilliance but devoid of any morals. Just like the protagonist.

I believe in a world where at least one just person exists at any given time. Same with my books. I could not for the life of me fawn over a novel where the author has completely stripped the world of at least one person with the agency of justice.

The world isn’t all evil; humanity, though feeble, isn’t invariably fallible. At least that’s what I want to read about.

So this book is brilliant. This book is a must-read. Unforgettable, indeed. In every sense of the word.

But I could not love a fiend for a hero.

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In the past seven years of #trolloping, I have read at least 12 novels by that towering figure of Victorian literature: Mr. Whiskers himself, Anthony Trollope. I have come to expect several things from a Trollope novel: a sharp grasp of human nature, a keen awareness of both hard and soft power, and the inevitable progression towards the marriage altar - no matter what obstacles have stood in the way of that “hymeneal” conclusion.
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His novels inevitably end in at least one marriage - this particular novel features no less than four - but you could hardly describe Trollope as the romantic type. Although his narrators tend to take a stern and punishing attitude towards loveless marriages, his plot-lines focus on the more worldly aspects of the marriage contract: cash and property, who has it, who needs it, and who may grant it.
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There are two autocrats in this novel: Louis Trevalyan and Miss Jemima Stanbury. They are both devoted to having their own way in interpersonal matters, and they are able to do so because they hold the purse-strings. They both pay a price for their emotional inflexibility - chiefly in loneliness - but Trevalyan’s despotic ways take a surprisingly sinister turn. It’s not that Trollope hasn’t previously included some baddies in his character mix, but I cannot recall another example of a would-be heroic protagonist who turns out to be so fatally flawed. Not only does Trollope venture into the murky depths of mental illness with Louis Trevalyan, but he also underlines that marriage is not always a safe status for women.
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As in The Warden - the first Trollope novel I read - the ending is melancholy and lacks a satisfying resolution. He doesn’t tie up all of the internal dramas with a neat bow. It’s funny how those happy endings can be rather forgettable; not so this novel. It has stuck in my mind for weeks now, strangely unsettling, and I suspect that there it will stay.
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#heknewhewasright #trollope #anthonytrollope #foliosociety

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