Books I've actually finished lately: 125

Often books speak of other books.

- Umberto Eco

(Audio)Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 124

More importantly, I've just discovered that a distant family member was a keen enthusiast of Basil Bunting.

Nomenclatterrrr!!!

Yes,



but...

(Audio)Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 123

To be alive as Chaucer was not the same as to be alive as Milton - or Tennyson, or Eliot, or Plath.

- Peter Whitfield

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 122

Or - Gimme Back My Goddamn Lighter, You Commie Bastard!

Spell Check A Racist

In which the ever-so-slightly smug Facebook group post an update with the inevitable spelling error...

Books I've actually finished lately: 121

I push the cause of the mullet because he is a low-class fish. He is simple. He is honest. He moves around in great formations or columns. He does damn near all the work. But he is also noble. He is like another noble thing I once loved, called 'soldier'.

- Col. Mike Malone

(This is, for better or worse, why there are no Brit warrior poets in the Iraqistan era.)

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 120

Books I've actually finished lately: 119

Conversation with my mother is like everyone's conversation with their mothers, but with a twist.
     'How come you never tell me what you're up to, but you reveal your innermost thoughts and most shameful anecdotes to everyone who reads the New Statesman?'
     'Well, if you match their rates we may be able to come to some arrangement...'

- Nicholas Lezard

Books I've actually finished lately:118

1) Epic poetry presupposes a professional tradition. 

2) 'They put him on the carved bed, and stood singers beside him,' [the same word is used for professional poets]... 

3) Everyone can wail in every family, but not everyone can make and sing the dirge.

- Peter Levi

Books I've actually finished lately: 117

Without my shadow I don't know how the other half feels.

- Nick Cave

(Jury's still out on the audio sample. Cave is reading it himself...)

Further thoughts on style

To imitate another man's style is like wearing a mask, which, be it never so fine, is not long in arousing disgust and abhorrence, because it is lifeless; so that even the ugliest living face is better.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature

Books I've actually finished lately: 116

We have to start sometime to turn the end of war into peace.

- Ajith Boyagoda

Cervantes - in context

I say, too, that when a painter desires to become famous in his art he endeavours to copy the originals of the rarest painters that he knows - and the same rule holds good for all the most important crafts and callings that serve to adorn a state. Thus must he who would be esteemed prudent and patient imitate Ulysses...

The truth about style (and vice versa)

If, being a coward, I take on a heroic tone, I am committing a stylistic mistake.

- Witold Gombrowicz (transl. Lillian Vallee), 'Against Poets'

Books I've actually finished lately: 115

I will have such difficulty in becoming English again.

- TE Lawrence, letter to his mother, 29/08/1909