Springing Into Spring
March 23, 2008
Contributing editor Lisa Guidarini lives in Illinois, and in an e-mail to me a few days ago she complained of snow (“again”). I sympathized and was even a bit envious—I love cold weather, rain and snow—because here, in southern coastal California, it is definitely spring. I have replaced my wool blanket with my lightweight comforter. I am wearing short sleeves and shorts. I have put the homemade chicken soup in the freezer, and am making gazpacho.
* * * Spring is a gift in many ways: lighter evenings, birds’ songs, leafy trees, the fresh scent of earthy air. But spring can also bring unexpected gifts such as hope in the form of a special gift. This week in Seasoned Lightly, Anne Michael shares her joy at watching a regret turn into joy. So often the books we grow up reading reflect the social and political winds that were blowing at the time. For baby boomer kids, those times were filled with the old Soviet-era enemy memories including espionage-based books and movies. But when he started working in a bookstore, Paul Clark began to read books by writers from behind the Iron Curtain. What would happen to the writers, he wondered, if they weren’t living and writing under the oppression of the government. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the answer emerged. In a rollicking collection of stories set in former Eastern European countries in the 1990s, Paul finds his thoughts turning to the contrasts of the Cold War and the Wild East worlds, this week in A Walk Through My Bookshelves. He turns 400 this year. The book for which he is most famous had its 340th birthday last year. While Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic poem, is being read, it is primarily in graduate seminars. This is a shame since it still has much to offer general readers, says Henry Carrigan in this week’s Readings, because when so much of the world seems to be out of control, the deep reflections Milton explores on the nature of humanity and humanity’s relationship to its world is now more relevant than any time before. Some books may not be great literature or even impressive stories, but they are still capable of drawing readers in to them. Lisa Guidarini, in Reviews & Reflections, found her recent reading of H.G. Wells’ story, The Time Machine, an “interesting peek inside the Victorian mind at the turn of the twentieth century” because it bordered the line between two eras of thought: blind faith and science. What is the Bookworm’s Curse? More importantly, what is the cure? Andi Miller is desperate to find out, this week in The Finicky Reader. Playing cards, depending on your point of view, be fun, addictive, a “road to the devil” or a way to while away a few hours of boredom. For me, it’s all fun. I grew up playing canasta with my grandmother. I later learned to play poker, and a card game that no one seems to have ever heard of called Spider. This week, in On Marking Books, I look at a bookmark I own in the shape and size of a playing card. The research was interesting, and I now know enough frivolous information about the history of cards and card playing to fill up the minutes while I wait for my partner to decide on his next move.
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Notebookism is a lovely blog created by Armand B. Frasco that is devoted to “the urge to create on paper . . . smooth creamy paper . . . [with] the delicate tinkling of nib against inkwell . . . stories and the methods to our madness, product reviews . . .” In short, this is a wonderful place to indulge that part of yourself that appreciates the feel and look of notebooks and their instrument-partners in handwritten art regardless of whether the writing is simply a list of daily reminders or the exploration of self. |