Bibliophile

If a library in England wanted to collect, Keith Richards would have to pay thousands of dollars.

May 22, 2013 Composition with taches ca. 1875Victor Hugo 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885Art of Victor Hugo:an overview of his drawings _______________________ Control And Freedom: Power And Paranoia In The Age Of Fiber OpticsWendy Hui-Kyong Chungoogle books In this book, I do not condemn the Internet—if anything, I hold it dear. Liking it or hating it, as such, is as pointless as being ‘‘optimistic’’ or ‘‘pessimistic’’ about its future. Rather, what we need is a serious en- gagement with the ways in which the Internet enables communications between humans and machines, enables—and stems from—a freedom that cannot be controlled. Because freedom is a fact we all share, we have decisions to make: freedom is not the result of our decisions, but rather, as Friedrich Schelling and Jean Luc Nancy have argued, what makes our decisions possible. This freedom is not inherently good, but entails a decision for ‘‘good’’—habitation and limitation—or for ‘‘evil’’— destruction. The gaps within technological control, the differences between technological control and its rhetorical counterpart, and technol- ogy’s constant failures mean that our control systems can never entirely make these decisions for us. Fiber-optic networks, this book argues, enable communications that physically instantiate and thus shatter enlightenment; they also link to- gether disparate locations that only sometimes communicate. We must take seriously the vulnerability that comes with communications—not so that we simply condemn or accept all vulnerability without question but so that we might work together to create vulnerable systems with which we can live. pdf available at monoskop _______________________ HeurekadetailJean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) _______________________ Creation Stories: Myths About the Origins of Money Christine A. Desan _______________________ Jean TinguelyJean Tinguely: “A Magic Stronger Than Death” Jean Tinguely Art Machines, 1959 _______________________ The Challenge of Theoterrorism Paul Cliteurnew english review (....) The politico-religious ideologies that target free speech go under a number of different names. “Fundamentalism,” “extremism,” “radicalism” – and these are only a few of the epithets that are used in the scholarly literature and political discourse on the subject. The most popular label is “extremism.” Although this term is current, I am reluctant to use it because it is too vague to be useful (there are many kinds of extremist behavior after all). A better term is “terrorism” perhaps, because this is used in legislation and scholarly literature. But even “terrorism” has many forms. The most remarkable development of the last decades is the resurgence of religious terrorism, or what one may also call “theoterrorism.” Theoterrorism is the type of terrorism that legitimizes violence by referring to “God.” The theoterrorist thinks and claims that the violence he exerts on the nation-state is done “in the name of God.” Arguably, the theoterrorist may be wrong in thinking he is a divinely appointed angel of vengeance. But it is perfectly possible not to enter into a discussion with theoterrorists or religious believers on whether or not the terrorist is right in his convictions. This would require an excursion into the philosophy of religion and theology that is unnecessary for someone interested in the social significance of theoterrorism. For an understanding of our contemporary world it may be more fruitful not to approach religion from a believer’s perspective, but from the angle of the social scientist who simply analyzes what other people think. In this case: what the religious terrorist thinks. What one may do is try to understand how his worldview is constructed. Many people are reluctant to engage in this kind of research. They are concerned with something quite different: protecting religious minorities from discrimination and the “stereotyping of their religion.”

Did somebody say GIVEAWAY?  Yes, we did.  Knock Knock is giving away not one…not two…but THREE Personal Library Kits to lucky ALB readers!  These are so cool, you guys.  You can enforce due dates on the people you loan your books to. We thought this was a nice way to celebrate our site’s shiny new look, and also thank you all for your patience while we get the kinks worked out. All you need to do is: 1. Reside in the continental U.S. (Sorry Alaska, Hawaii, and the rest of the world, but shipping is just too darned expensive.) 2. Comment on this post before the contest ends at midnight on 5/29/13.  Tell us how awesome Knock Knock is, how awesome Awful Library Books is, how awesome I am (ok, you can comment on Mary too), or something about libraries or weeding. Mary and I are the biggest fans of Knock Knock Stuff.  I’m pretty sure every birthday and Christmas gift we’ve ever given each other over the past decade came from Knock Knock.  Take a look at their site – you’ll love it too! -Holly

I Want My MTV, Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum (M, 30s, slicked-back brown hair, suede jacket, navy sweater, L train) http://bit.ly/11I8RdR

Mealtime Marvels with Margarine National Cotton Council 1950 (est) Margarine! It’s just like butter! When you want to serve your family the best, think margarine. (It’s FORTIFIED!) I love this little cookbook! The entire theme is how magarine is fancier and better than plain old butter. I actually did a bit of searching since I know nothing about margarine other than I would prefer butter. I did ran across this  older Mental Floss article about crazy history of margarine, which is actually pretty interesting. Who knew? Now everyone run into the kitchen and glorify those plain old meals with some sexy margarine. Mary More Old School Cookbooks: Spry? Fear Factor or Fine Food? Tuna Chip Casserole or Tomato Cheese Delight

Today my mother would have been eighty years old. We would have had a party for her. Instead we each remember her in our own ways. Last night, my father, who keeps her grave so beautifully pristine, stopped by to show me the calla lilies he will take her today. She would have liked that so much. She would have been deeply moved by my father's constancy—always there, even when the rain starts to fall. I will think of her listening to the chimes that play every day, the songs that float above. The flicker of butterflies. The call of birds. Happy birthday, Mom. We miss you.

These are the facts: Rachel Shihor is an Israeli writer. She is a professor of philosophy and an accomplished academic. Two of her novels, The Tel Avivians and Yankinton, have been published in Israel. Days Bygone, a series of excerpts from Yankinton, is her only work to date that has been published in English. (See this profile of her in The Quarterly Conversation.) Up until April of this year, that was about all I had been able to discover about this remarkable writer. Meanwhile, everybody I talked to about Shihor’s work had confessed to being captivated by her language, and expressed their hope, to a man, that more would be available for them to read soon. The verdict is clear: Shihor’s fiction is one of those rare gifts readers may encounter once every few years: writing to linger over, to discuss, to share. I contacted Rachel in April and was delighted when she agreed to meet me in Tel Aviv, both to talk about her work and to learn more about her life. This interview is the result of that meeting and an ensuing email correspondence. It is also my great pleasure to announce that her collection of shorts, Stalin is Dead, will be published by Sylph Editions in November 2013. — Mona Reiserer Many of your novels are set in Tel Aviv. Of course, there is The Tel Avivians, and inDays Bygone the narrator remembers her childhood in Tel Aviv. Did you grow up in here too? Well, I was born in Poland, in 1937, two years before the war. I remember the day the Germans arrived. My family was on vacation at a well-known resort, Zakopane, popular with Jews and non-Jews alike. We were in a dining room, a very large one, when we heard a cry, “The Germans are here!” All around me I heard chairs falling to the ground. Everything was in uproar, and first of all we just wanted to go home, because we were in a strange city and we needed to be at home before we could decide anything. My family and I spent a year under German occupation. I remember my mother knitting the yellow star to my coat. We came to Israel, then Palestine, in 1940: nobody could believe it when we told them that we came in 1940. I was three years old when we arrived, so yes, I did grow up in Tel Aviv. I remember it all in so much detail … many, many details. As a child of two, the sight of Zakopane – the world returned to chaos – influenced my whole life. Most of my writing is about this connection between being peaceful and being frightened to death at the same time. It is a riddle, an absolute riddle, how the people who survived the Holocaust are still able to live. My writing is about trying to understand this. When did you begin to write? I began maybe 15 years ago. I always felt that I wanted to, but I did not start properly until I was near the end of my professional life. At school I was always good at writing compositions, but I was also interested in philosophy, so I made teaching it my profession. But through all that time I always felt the impulse to write fiction. I know you have written academic papers about religion and the philosophy of religion, and your fiction too is often concerned with questions of God, belief, and the implications of belief. It seems to me that many of your characters are suspicious of belief and tend to see it as a delusion. Am I correct in this assessment? God fulfills a very important role. And of course this topic always resurfaces in literature. You cannot read Kafka and remain ignorant of religious thought and theological questions. You cannot read The Castle, for example, and escape the idea that the human race is ensnared by hierarchies. Religion depends on these hierarchies. It depends on the fact that there are people who want to reach the castle, and their idea that reaching it will fulfill some deep and persistent need. But actually the castle is not so sacred and important; it is nasty and corrupt and disgusting. It is savagery behind closed doors. However, the quest for the castle is not unequivocal: not ev

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. Reading has been put to the wayside lately in favour of practical, career-related activities.  I have to admit, I was having so much fun with those tasks that I didn’t even notice that I hadn’t picked up a book in four days!  Sometimes it is fun to read and sometimes it is fun to be productive: the two don’t necessarily overlap well.  But I’ve worked through what I really needed to get done and should be able to spare a little more time for books going forward. The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks – I need to finally read something by Sacks and this sounds like a fun place to start (but then all his books sound fun). Does This Church Make Me Look Fat? by Rhoda Janzen – I am incapable of passing by any sort of personal narrative about faith.  It is an entirely foreign concept to me and, probably for that reason, endlessly fascinating. The Sunshine Years by Afsaneh Knight – Alex in Leeds reviewed this book about angst-ridden 30-something Australians last month and I immediately placed a hold on it. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes – Simon S’s review of this last year brought it to my attention and Library Loot co-host Marg’s equal enthusiasm for it made me certain that I had to try it. A Thousand Farewells by Nahlah Ayed – I borrowed this last September when I already had too many other books checked out and too many reviews needing to be written.  Now I have the time to do this book, a memoir about Ayed’s experiences in the Middle East, justice. Capital by John Lanchester – I borrowed this at the same time as I first picked up A Thousand Farewells and ran into the same problems.  This is one of the only books published in 2012 that I was really excited about so I am looking forward to it.  What I’ve read so far has been very promising.  What did you pick up this week?

It is only Wednesday, but already the week has taken its toll on me. Monday was an especially difficult day. The kind of day I can't write about here. The kind of day where I rush home to be with my daughter and hold her close, never wanting to let go. Yesterday was better. The weekend was nice though. We had Mouse's soccer class on Saturday. It was the second to last class, and I am kind of glad for that. Still, it has been fun. It is a parent/child class, and my husband and I take turns going through the exercises with Mouse. Mouse's attention wasn't quite on the game this past Saturday. She was more interested in following around her friend, another girl in the class. They are quite a pair! During all the goofing off and not paying attention, I was quite surprised then when Mouse stepped forward when the coach asked who wanted to go first and dribble the ball to a designated spot where the child would then kick the ball into the goal. My kid can follow directions when she wants to. Being the two year old she is, Mouse was back to wandering off and chasing after her friend again directly after. Sundays have become our quiet family days. We do not do much, but they can be fun. I taught Mouse how to play hide and seek recently and that's become one of her favorite games. Her idea of hiding is to curl up in a ball in a corner on the floor--and as soon as you start looking for her, she pops up and says, "Here I am!" When it's my turn to hide, she makes a point of telling me where to hide, will make sure I'm there, and then will proceed to look in all the same places I made a show of looking for her. "Not under the table." "Not under the blanket." "I found you!" It's moments like these that I treasure. Getting back to the subject--or at least where I intended to go when I first started writing this post--I am no longer going home for lunch during the week (bye, bye audio book time) and instead am camping out in an empty office where I can read uninterrupted for an hour each day. I am enjoying having this precious reading time back again, but confess I do miss going home for that short time too. I may start going home at lunch time once a week at least, depending. We'll see. I used to be such a workaholic and would work through my lunches, full speed ahead. Now I not only want the time away, I need it. I took advantage of my extra reading time to read Laura Lippman's And When She Was Good. I am still processing my thoughts on this one, but I did enjoy it. Laura Lippman is an author I've read before although not much of. I can see why so many people love her books. Earlier this week, I started reading Menna van Praag's The House at the End of Hope Street, a book I have had my eye on for awhile now. I'm quite smitten with it so far. What are you reading right now? Every Tuesday Diane from Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where participants share the first paragraph (or a few) of a book they are reading or thinking about reading soon. The house has stood at the end of Hope Street for nearly two hundred years. It's larger than all others, with turrets and chimneys rising into the sky. The front garden grows wild, the long grasses scattered with cowslips, reaching toward the low-hanging leaves of the willow trees. At night the house looks like a Victorian orphanage housing a hundred despairing souls, but when the clouds part and it is lit by moonlight, the house appears to be enchanted. As if Rapunzel lives in the tower and a hundred Sleeping Beauties lie in the beds. It was the description of this book, The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag, that first sold me on it: "Past residents have included Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Parker, who, after receiving the assistance they needed, hung around to help newcomers—literally, in talking p

I’ve got more books waiting to be read than I can possibly read in the near future, so many that they’re sitting around making me feel just a bit guilty that I can’t get round to them. So this post is just to list some of the titles, quoting the publishers’ blurbs. Here are a few in no particular order and with no recommendation to read them, these are simply books that have been sent to me by the author/publisher to read and review. I may post my own thoughts on these books at a later date. Pictures at an Exhibition by Camilla Macpherson – published April 2012 Blurb from the Back Cover London, 1942 - With bombs raining down on London, the National Gallery’s most treasured paintings have been hidden away. The authorities have decided that only one masterpiece will be displayed each month. And each month, Daisy Milton writes to her cousin Elizabeth to tell her about the paintings, her life – and the man she loves. London, present day - A terrible tragedy has left Claire’s marriage to Rob in tatters and there seems little hope of reconciliation. Then she finds Daisy’s letters, written to Rob’s grandmother, and gradually, picture by picture, month by month, Daisy’s world in the 1940s becomes more real to Claire than her own. Slowly, too, she begins to notice intriguing parallels between both their lives. But Daisy is from another time, and unless Claire can find a way to make sense of the past, she risks losing everything that she cares about in the present. Midnight in St Petersburg by Vanora Bennett – published April 2013 Blurb from Amazon: St Petersburg,1911: Inna Feldman has fled the pogroms of the south to take refuge with distant relatives in Russia’s capital city. Welcomed into the flamboyant Leman family, she is apprenticed into their violin-making workshop. With her looks and talents, she feels instantly at home in their bohemian circle of friends. But revolution is in the air and, as society begins to fracture, she is forced to choose between her heart and her head.She loves her brooding cousin, Yasha, but he is wild, destructive and bent on revolution; Horace Wallich, the Englishman who works for Fabergé, is older and promises security and respectability. As the revolution descends into anarchy and blood-letting, a commission to repair a priceless Stradivarius violin offers Inna a means of escape. But will man will she choose to take with her? And is it already too late? A Fearful Madness by Julius Falconer – published March 2013  Blurb from the back cover: If you think that religion, sex, the aristocracy and mystery might make a good crime novel, TRY THIS ONE! A police investigation into the violent death of a part-time cathedral verger stalls for lack of incriminating evidence. However, three people have a close interest in clearing the matter up where the police have failed: the dead man’s sister, anxious to see justice done, and two of the police suspects, both released without charge but keen to clear their names. Striking out on their own, each approaches the murder from a different perspective: book-trafficking on the black market; revenge by an extremist religious organisation for the dead man’s betrayal of them; and retaliation in a case of blackmail. The police continue to maintain that the murder was committed out of sexual anger, even though they have no proof apart from the circumstances of the verger’s death. Eventually DI Moat and his assistant DS Stockwell, from the North Yorkshire Force, take a hand. Moat pays his predecessors in the investigation, both professional and amateur, the compliment of taking their findings seriously – but comes up with an idea of his own. The Spark by O H Robsson – Kindle edition, oublished February 2013 Blurb from Amazon: He steps off the train and they’re there, watching and waiting, anticipating the moment when his head will turn and their eyes will meet. Bu