lisa guidarini: freelance writer/reviewer
Frederick expected that he would have felt spasms of joy; but the passions grow pale when we find ourselves in an altered situation; and, as he no longer saw Madame Arnoux in the environment wherein he had known her, she seemed to him to have lost some of her fascination; to have degenerated in …
You may want to cover your ears if you don't already know this: I sold off hundreds of my books before I came to Scotland, keeping only two or three dozen. Even for a temporary move, ownership of that sheer volume of books was problematic. I had nowhere to store them. My daughter was moving, …
When I'm not reading books, I'm reading books about books. Ditto books about or featuring librarians, the history of books and reading, book making (not as in gambling, only because I don't have the money because I spend it on books), book art, book cover art, paper making, and anything even remotely connected to …
Julian Barnes - A Life with Books. Jonathan Cape/Random House, 2012. 27 pp. [Personal copy.] Novelist, essayist, Booker Prize winner and all around genius writer Julian Barnes published this tiny essay for charity. I found out about it and was able to buy a copy from 'cross the pond. It's about what a little …
Busy reading for review and even a bit for optional review. I always manage to squeeze in a little of both. That's what they call "life balance." Others may insist this is actually keeping your house clean, exercising, running errands and reading. But I'm not others. Work and pleasure; pleasure and work. And the occasional …
No time to pursue this week, but once I'm home from Booktopia with fellow blogger Bibliosue expect me to run off at the keyboard about this brilliant article from The Atlantic: http://tinyurl.com/6m3fzxe It's from 2001, and I've probably read it before, actually, but it's particularly striking now because the issue of literary/genre fiction …
Continue reading A Preponderance of Pondering: or, Curiouser and Curiouser.
Hope you all had a lovely Easter. Sorry I had nothing of note to post. It's difficult keeping our heads above water right now, what with my father-in-law battling cancer, our water heater breaking and leaking all over the basement floor and our upstairs bathtub deciding to join the party and drip into our …
Continue reading Post-Easter reading blitz and domestic disasters
Last Wednesday was my birthday. In honor of that I'm posting a photo of one of the lilies in the bouquet I received. The other part of my present was a gift card to Barnes & Noble, which I surprisingly have not yet spent. Every year my husband gives me a …
We had a staff meeting this morning re: the new direction libraries are headed and what that will mean for our own library within the next 10-15 years. I expressed my trepidation regarding the ongoing fight between publishers and libraries in a previous post and the more I think about it the more I'm even …
