Dostoevsky v pornography (Afghanistan edition)

Porn is prevalent, more prevalent than Dostoevsky.

- Dan Clements, in The Times

Books I've actually finished lately: 125

Often books speak of other books.

- Umberto Eco

Distant Eco

In the light of the sad passing of Umberto Eco, I am tickled to discover - turning, for the first time, to the opening pages of The Name of the Rose - that the 'missing' manuscript on which Eco's first and still most famous novel is entirely predicated is only missing because a woman 'he' was sleeping with ran off with it.

Wow.

I have just received and read through the 70-odd pages of a publisher's Jan-June 2016 catalogue... and found not a single book that I'd be interested in taking a look at, let alone sitting down and reviewing.

#LAD

11-year-old boy dresses as Christian Grey for World Book Day.

I was entirely on this kid's side... until I read the mother's rationalisation of it.

And the award for Best Use of the Phrase 'Uncorrected Proof' goes to...

Fitzcarraldo

Only books provide some measure of comfort.

- Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless

Book sale!!!*

--
* in Sri Lanka

How to use the hyphen

It seems to me that an electronic text cannot emotionally engage its owner as can an actual book ‒ paper, papyrus or vellum, airport paperback or Daunt Books hardback or super-luxurious lavishly-illustrated limited-edition coffee-table tome.

- Josh Spero, Second-Hand Stories (imminent)

Things I did NOT see myself doing (just yet)

#377  Attempting to paraphrase a Ferdowsi - via Basil Bunting - story about the division of the world between Afaridun's sons to a 7-year-old on a train stuck somewhere outside London Bridge.

(Also, why I can write on my books... but he probably shouldn't.)

Fair dos to Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg has started a book club, and the publishers are running out of nominated books already.

Spectator 'Books of the Year'

or; How to Blog, by Jeremy Clarke.

Received

(courtesy DS Hilton)

Facebooks - I

So, this thing is going round that you name ten books that had a major impact on you.

Ten books is not enough.

--

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
Oscar Wilde - Richard Ellmann
One of the many biographies of The Doors [I will endeavour to recall         the particular volume]
The New English Hymnal - various
Tintin [all of] - Hergé
Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis - Wendy Cope
The Last Samurai - Helen DeWitt
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto - David Shields
The Collected Stories of... - Lydia Davis

--

Notes / Self-imposed Rules:

1) No particular order of importance.
2) Links are to editions read, where possible.
3) One book per author.
4) -ish. Book stipulated is either first read or first enjoyed.

Things one is not typically asked

while trying to download a free PDF:

[Author's note: see following post.]

Intriguing...

Back in the pre-WWW days you couldn’t just whip open your phone and command it to give you a rare book: You had to brave odd looks in rare bookstore after bookstore by people who had never heard of The Codex Seraphinianus and who highly suspected you had either hallucinated the existence of such a book or had heard of the book from someone else who had hallucinated it.

- Dangerous Minds, on the (now extant) Rizzoli edition of the Codex Seraphinianus

--
Footnotelet: What does it mean to have a 'French' edition of this (ostensibly untranslatable) book?

So...

My housemate has asked me - post factum - if it is alright that she borrowed one of my books to level her projector.

The book is not a first edition, or anything (and yes, I did notice the gap on the bookshelf; and yes, I do know precisely which book it is), so I said it was fine, and it was. Kind of.

Let's say this housemate is a chef. It occurs to me now to wonder how she'll react when I borrow her food mixer, dehydrating rack, or imported Japanese knife-whetting stones to prop up my 'overflow' bookstacks...

'Might stop somewhere for a read...'

Very sorry

never to have laid eyes on a copy of this.

(Any have decent literary connections in Bangkok?)

Recommended

by Dominic Hilton.