55 Reading Questions
1. Favorite childhood book? Richard Scarry’s Chipmunk ABC’s
2. What are you reading right now? America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, Why I’m Not a Hindu by Dr. Ramendra, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, Memories of Philippine Kitchens by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan, and Encyclopedia of the Exquisite by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins
3. What books do you have on request at the library? Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain
4. Bad book habit? Folding them back…
5. What do you currently have checked out at the library? Like 29 books, mostly things I was reading for my honors thesis. But one thing I have and intend to read soon is Rolling the R’s by R. Zamora Linmark. Clearly, I am on a Southeast Asian lit kick right now.
Read More
I thought I would reward myself for a weekend of hard work. I intended to buy new music on Amazon, for which I have a $5 credit thanks to spending $200 on books this semester; but then got to looking up The Oxford Companion to Wine which the anth. professor who taught our wine-tasting lessons last weekend says is the only wine book worth owning. I got the expensive volume in it’s second edition, rather than the current third edition, used for $5.98 & free shipping. This book is going to be a great addition in my future apartment.
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‘Don’t you ever mind,’ she asked suddenly, ‘not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?’
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
December 23-29
- Last minute Christmas shopping/stress/buying more things for myself than for the people on my gift list.
- Tried Leinenkugel’s Fireside Nut Brown Beer; Blue Moon’s Winter Abbey remains the winter seasonal brews champion for me, but this might take second place.
- Culinary Adventures: Sweet Potato & Califlower Soup, Saag
- Filipino Christmas Party
- Gifts with Mom and Sister = 1 Nautica Nautical Throw Blanket, 1 “Watermelon Dress,” 1 Anchor shirt, 5 pairs of underwear, 2 pairs of silk “long underwear,” a set of 4 anchor placemats for the future apartment
- Christmas morning = sleeping in. Breakfast = 1 fried egg, 1 banana with peanut butter & honey, 2 slices cinnamon sugar toast, & chai green tea in a mug from my Starbucks holiday collection.
- Christmas early dinner with Grandma and cousin at Chinese Restaurant. This is my kind of Christmas.
- Successfully wore “funeral formal” to every Holiday/Christmas gathering I attended.
- Christmas exchange with A.Dew = Cool Shooters Ice Tray, Glittery Wallet/Clutch, souvenir shot glass, wool scarf. + Wine goblet decorating for New Year’s Eve + Black Swan (Swan Queen, what are you!).
- Post-Christmas shoe shopping at Payless = 1 pair brown flats, 1 pair nude, closed-toe heels, 1 pair (nautical) navy blue wedges for $29.42. Score.
- Finally, some snow!
- Watched Plastic Planet with sister: “These chemicals do not kill you. These chemicals harm your quality of life.” Scary.
- $201.06 for 17 Spring semester books
- Grades in: excellent semester!
- Finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Weekend Wishlist:
- Sipping champagne from my glittery, gigantic wine glass on NYE, in my gold dress & my spirit hood with my best friends
- Fully functioning new transmission, pretty please!
» Losing our soul: On Borders closing
Some say that bookstores are superfluous in the age of Amazon.com and electronic readers. This is nonsense. People need bookstores for reasons that go far beyond shopping.
Bookstores, whether independent or part of a chain, are places where you can lose yourself. You wander the aisles of bookstores until books you didn’t even know existed beckon you to partake of intellectual nourishment between their pages.
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» Adorkable: Girl at a Table
readattheshow:
A book is opened to the last panel on the last page,
and she sits with a tear in her eye, knowing that a
hero is about to fade away.
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I can’t stand lies. Probably no one can. Probably everyone is, to varying degrees, allergic to them, both spiritually and physically. Lies make me feel low and ignoble and also itchy, like there’s sand under my skin. The only thing worse than hearing a lie is telling one.
Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos
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Instead, she sat there, smiling that small, small inscrutable smile, like Mona Lisa herself, although I must say that until that moment, I’d never found Mona Lisa’s smile particularly interesting or even particularly a smile. Looking at her, I understood what probably everyone else already knows about the woman in that painting: we are drawn to her not because of what the smile gives us but because it gives nothing. We are waiting to get past the smile. We are waiting - we’ve spent centuries waiting - for the woman to speak.
Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos
» The Library Hotel!
The Library Hotel NY near Grand Central Station in New York City is the first unique hotel in Manhattan ever to offer its guests over 6,000 volumes of books organized throughout the hotel by the Dewey Decimal System. Each of the 10 guestroom floors honor one of the 10 categories of the DDC, and each of the 60 rooms are uniquely adorned with a collection of books and art exploring a distinctive topic within the category it belongs to.
» Why I Read
I don’t bother to tell them that reading will sensitize them to the human condition, because they haven’t lived long enough to know what is meant by the human condition.
(Source: ilovepancakes89, via informate)
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For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
John Milton, Areopagitica
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