I Capture the Castle

 

Cover art by

booky wooks

So the much hyped Olive Kitteridge was kinda super depressing. It was like, 'This book makes me want to break out the razorblades and start slicing lengthwise,' but the writing was good so I stuck with it. Started out chirpy but quickly descended into a monotony of 'life sucks and then you get sick and die real slow'.. or tempering one's melancholy with donuts and pie. Spoiler alert? ha. 

Make no mistake, Elizabeth Strout is an exceptional writer and her stories are deeply moving. I loved her humor, her characterizations and eloquent observations about the sometimes ineffable qualities that make people tick... but I reckon life is hard enough without having to read about it over and over again. Did not appreciate the fact that I had to grope about for my bearings in every other chapter as a bevy of new characters were introduced; who, while interesting; unraveled threads that led mostly nowhere. Soo unsatisfying. 

                                                                    Cover Art

  
    

Just about devoured Gone Away Lake and Return To Gone Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright. Love the vintage cover art. Wasn't expecting much, but found myself entirely lost in the enchanting summer adventures of a pair of cousins who stumble upon and bring life to a small Victorian ghost town that lies decaying by a dried-up lake. Utterly charming! For a children's book, the writing was impeccable. Funny too, I laughed out loud quite a bit. This line made me devoutly thankful for my own cousin-friend: “Now isn't that nice!" said the old lady. "If cousins are the right kind, they're best of all: kinder than sisters and brothers, and closer than friends.” Trufax! except I'm fortunate in that my siblings are both exceptionally kind. 

 Another gem where one cousin, Portia, describes the other: Julian has "about a hundred thousand freckles on his face, all sizes, and the same color as his hair. He says it's the influence of the carrot on his appearance; that when he was a little kid, carrots were the only vegetable he'd eat, and he ate them every day for every meal except breakfast. So he turned orange. Uncle Jake always says, 'Good thing it was carrots and not spinach.'" Bazinga! This Julian reminds me of my own nephew; an intrepid young naturalist in the making, wandering around collecting inchworms & butterflies, overflowing with entomological factoids and a bubbling enthusiasm for the ephemeral. Basically this book is how life should be. *wistful sigh* Maybe I should just stick to kid lit.

Next on the formidable and ever-growing Reading List:

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen                               The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

 

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

Just thought I'd throw in a pic of Mr Thornton nee Richard Armitage for good measure and also because no mention of North & South is complete without his mug. Yes, I am shallow like that.

Red Riding Hood

             I've been painting driftwood and reading fairy tales.  
Writing children's books seems like it'd be a worthwhile pursuit.

  

       

  

  

  

        

                             Grandmother's slippers

                              Tea-soaked bags

                               Bread & butter pudding

                                Seen through cracks

                             All is fullness

                              Pervading peace

                               Til the pull

                                of fang-bared teeth

                             Echoes down forest lane

                              Red robin's breast

                               Bloody, broken, maimed

                                Tattered lupine mess

                                                        Eep. Then again, maybe not.

♬ July Flame

Forgot I had this most excellent of albums. kerplunk. Laura Veirs + b&b pudding = a very satisfactory afternoon. humm. When I was a kid I used to say pud-ding, not pood-ing. Puddles, pudding. Made sense at the time but the world has since laughed it out of me.

'July Flame' always makes me think of this magnificent passage from Ray Bradbury's spellbinding 'Something Wicked This Way Comes':

The wind flew Jim away. A similar kite, Will swooped to follow.

Watching the boys vanish away, Charles Halloway suppressed a sudden urge to run with them, make the pack. He knew what the wind was doing to them, where it was taking them, to all the secret places that were never so secret again in life. Somewhere in him, a shadow turned mournfully over. You had to run with a night like this, so the sadness could not hurt.

Look! he thought. Will runs because running is its own excuse. Jim runs because something’s up ahead of him. Yet, strangely, they do run together.

What’s the answer, he wondered, walking through the library, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, putting out the lights, is it all in the whorls on our thumbs and fingers? Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar’s lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.

That’s Jim, all bramblehair and itchweed.

And Will? Why, he’s the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? How can it happen to them? 

But Jim, now, he knows it happens, he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected,and never asks why; he knows. He always knew. Someone knew before him, a long time ago, someone who had wolves for pets and lions for night conversants. Hell, Jim doesn't know with his mind. But his body knows. And while Will's putting a bandage on his latest scratch, Jim's ducking, waving, bouncing away from the knockout blow which must inevitably come.                                           

  So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will's along, Will breaking one instead of none because Jim's watching. Gosh how we get our fingers in each others clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other..

Yeah yeah tl;dr but dang-a-lang! he's a kickass writer. *happy shiver*

I want to go to there..

Booktree at Lloyd's of Kew Booksellers

Heaven on earth.. or close enough.

From Ulrike Bulle, former owner of Lloyd's: 

"I commissioned the booktree for my bookshop in 2006 and it was designed and built by Tim Vincent-Smith - Isn't it lovely?
 
The tree stems came from an island in the Thames nearby, where Tim was living on a boat. They were covered in little wood worm holes but we assumed that they would have died in the water... Wrong! They came crawling out in the comfort of my shop! We had to coat the thing in woodworm poison for a few weeks. Now my own house is full of books of course and I'm dreaming of installing a booktree there..."

*swoon* I wouldn't mind one myself! minus the wormy invaders of course. Vintage books make me happy-clappy!

images via Ulrika Bulle

Booktree design by Tim Vincent-Smith.

Christmas time is here again!

 

Sneaks up on me every single year! 

Time to break out the only movies worth watching in December aka Elf, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Home Alone 1 & 2, Little Women and While You Were Sleeping! The weather has been practically arctic this year (by tropical girl standards). Feeling a definite need to curl up in pajammies with a mug of hot chocolate and get my read on with 'Little House in the Big Woods' and 'The Long Winter'. Hibernation ftw!

Tis the season to be jolly

Fa la la la la!