Tag Archives: Books

Two Christmas Trees

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9

What happens when you take a family of four book fanatics and turn them loose on Christmas?  You end up with a Christmas tree-sized pile of books to rival your Christmas tree:

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Between the four of us, we received 24 books today.  Isn’t that awesome?  Can you guess what we are going to be doing all week?  (It will probably take longer than that….)

From the bottom up:

Archeology Aegean Islands edited by A. G. Vlachopoulos

Botanical Inks by Babs Behan

Kaukasis: The Cookbook by Olia Hercules

Working with Wool by Sylvia Olsen

The Anarchy by William Dalrymple

Death in the East by Abir Mukherjee

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

Milk soaps by Anne-Marie Faiola

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz  Zafon

Vegetarian Southwest by Lon Walters

A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles by Ned Palmer

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Notes from a Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent

wheesht by Kate Davies

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

What happened, Miss Simone? by Alan Light

Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

Did anyone wonder why there are two copies of Invisible Women?  This is because I bought it for Emma, and she bought it for me:

For all who celebrate the holiday, Merry Christmas!  And to everyone everywhere, I hope you can snuggle up to a good book today!

You can’t make this stuff up

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23

I am in South Africa at the moment with a super busy week of teaching on my plate.  I had no plans to write a post, but noticed this little tidbit in the Guardian, and couldn’t resist.  Apparently, there is a new fad going around (by that I mean in places I don’t normally navigate like Instagram and Pinterest) which involves shelving your books with the spines facing backwards, in order to maintain a neutral colour scheme.  For your enlightenment, a photo:

Photo from The Guardian, online International version, January 16, 2018; see link

You can’t make this stuff up!

The article, with the fantastic title, “Shelf effacement: how not to organise your bookshelves”, notes:

“Back in October, design blog Apartment Therapy shared one of these backwards bookshelves on its Instagram account, with advice for emulating the look. (“Books don’t match your decor? Don’t fret … Flip them for a perfectly coordinated look.”) US morning show Today called it “a beautiful thing to try”, and, naturally, it’s all over Pinterest.”

Perhaps I am the last person on earth to have seen this trend (alas, I have failed at Trends R Us), but surely this is a scam perpetrated by a blogger on a slow news day?  This is so ridiculous I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

News alert: There is no single prettier thing to have in a room than a bookshelf filled with a riot of books. (Dare I say it? Even a bookcase full of YARN cannot match up to it.  That’s how much I believe this!)  Who needs order and bland beige-ness when one can have disorder and colour and BOOKS!

The whole joy of a bookshelf is in reading the titles (hopefully followed by reading the books).  What do they say about the owner?  How many fantastic conversations can you start by examining the shelves?  How can you make a rainy day lovely?  Will you discover a kindred spirit?  How can we make your heart go pitter-pat and your fingers start to tingle just by the proximity to the lovely written word?  And, far more importantly, what little treasures are there just waiting for you to read, or at the very least, drool over (figuratively, of course)?

And now, rant over, we return you to your regularly scheduled entertainment.  Tune in again soon for some knitting news (guaranteed to not match your colour scheme).