never stop reading

For the rising inspirations and the courageous ideas in writing, for the deep reading and the zigzag scanning of books, for all ways, paths and mediums as much as they brag and excite about reading – the profound, sonorous and ravenous reading. This blog lies on the humble idea that to keep off narrow-mindedness and one-sidedness, one must never stop reading. *Never stop reading {it's healthy.}*

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“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

William Faulkner

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An excerpt from Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

"Gustave taught Caroline about literature. I quote her: "He considered no book dangerous that was well written." Move forward seventy years or so to a different household in another part of France. This time there is a bookish boy, a mother, and a friend of the mother's called Mme Picard. The boy later wrote his memoirs; again, I quote: "Mme Picard's opinion was that a child should be allowed to read everything. "No book can be dangerous if it is well written." The boy, aware of Mme Picard's frequently expressed view, deliberately exploits her presence and asks his mother's permission to read a particular and notorious novel. "But if my little darling reads books like that at his age," says the mother, "what will he do when he grows up?" "I shall live them out!" he replies. It was one of the cleverest retorts of his childhood; it went down in family history, and it won him—or so we are left to assume—readership of the novel. The boy was Jean-Paul Sartre. The book was Madame Bovary."

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A man on a horse waiting for the bookmobile to arrive, circa 1930s.

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Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle

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Wonderland

"Love is essential: gregariousness is optional. Cherish your nearest and dearest. Work with colleagues you respect. Scan new acquaintances for those who might fall into the former categories or whose company you enjoy for its own sake. And don’t worry about socializing with everyone else. Relationships make everyone happier, introverts included, but think quality over quantity.

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers-of persistence, concentration, insight, and sensitivity-to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems,make art, think deeply.

Figure out what you are meant to contribute to this world and make sure you contribute it. If this requires public speaking or networking or other activities that make you uncomfortable, do them anyway. But accept that they’re difficult, get the training you need to make them easier, and reward yourself when you’re done.

Quit your job as a TV anchor and get a degree in library science. But if TV anchoring is what you love, then create an extroverted persona to get yourself through the day. Here’s a rule of thumb for networking events; one new honest-go-to-goodness relationship is worth ten fistfuls of business cards. Rush home afterward and kick back on your sofa. Carve our restorative niches.

Respect your loved one’s need for socializing and your own for solitude.

Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you're supposed to. Stay home on New Years Eve if that’s what makes you happy. Skip the committee meeting. Cross the street to avoid making aimless chitchat with random acquaintances. Read. Cook. Run. Write a story. Make a deal with yourself that you’ll attend a set number of social events in exchange for not feeling guilty when you beg off.

If your children are quiet, help them make peace with new situations and new people, but otherwise let them be themselves. Delight in the originality of their minds. Take pride in the strength of their consciences and the loyalty of their friendships. Don’t expect them to follow the gang. Encourage them to follow their passions instead. Throw confetti they claim the fruits of those passions, whether it’s on the drummer’s throne, on the softball field, or the page.

If you’re a teacher, enjoy your gregarious and participatory students. But don’t forget to cultivate the shy, the gentles, the autonomous, the ones with single-minded enthusiasms for chemistry sets or parrot taxonomy or nineteenth-century art. They are the artists, engineers, and thinkers of tomorrow.

If you’re a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice how you design your organization’s office space. Don’t expect introverts to get jazzed up about open office plans or, for that matter, lunchtime birthday parties or team-building retreats. Make the most of introverts’ strengths–these are people who can help you think deeply, strategize, solve complex problems, and spot canaries in your coal mine.

Also remember the degrees of the New Groupthink. If it’s creativity you are after, ask your employees to solve problems alone before sharing their ideas. If you want the wisdom of the crowd, gather it electronically, or in writing, and make sure people can’t see each other ideas until everyone’s had the chance to contribute. Face-to-face contact is important because it builds trust, but group dynamics contain unavoidable impediments to creative thinking. Arrange people to interact one-on-one and in small, casual groups. Don’t mistake assertiveness or eloquence for good ideas. If you have a proactive work force (and I hope you do) remember that they may perform better an introverted leader that an extroverted or charismatic one.

Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the efforts costs them energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama. So the next time you see a person with a composed face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.

We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in the world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard’s education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of available peer, but to use well the kind you’ve been granted. Introverts are offered keys to private gardens full of riches. To possess such a key is to tumble like Alice down her rabbit hole. She didn’t choose to go to Wonderland–but she made it an adventure that was fresh and fantastic and very much her own.

Lewis Carol was an introvert, too, by the way. Without him, there would be no Alice in Wonderland."

— Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

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The next morning I told Mom I couldn't go to school again, She asked what was wrong. I told her, "The same thing that’s always wrong." "You're sick?" "I'm sad." "About Dad?" "About everything.." She sat down on the bed next to me, even though I knew she was in a hurry. "What's everything?" I started counting on my fingers: "The meat and dairy products in our refrigerator, fistfights, car accidents, Larry-" "Who's Larry?" "The homeless guy in front of the Museum of Natural History who always says ‘I promise it’s for food’ after he asks for money." She turned around and I zipped her dress while I kept counting. "How you don’t know who Larry is, even though you probably see him all the time, how Buckminster just sleeps and eats and goes to the bathroom and has no ‘raison d’etre’, the short ugly guy with no neck who takes tickets at the IMAX theater, how the sun is going to explode one day, how every birthday I always get at least one thing I already have, poor people who get fat because they eat junk food because it’s cheaper…

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

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So deep, so explicit. Journey Into the Past is a reminiscent. It's a story about memories, past and loss. It's a dream broken from circumstances, war and social taboos; a journey to something that has departed before it had even arrived. It's one last try to revive the irrevocably lost. This is one the most beautifully written novellas I have ever read. Without exaggeration, a must read for every self-respecting reader.

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Designed by Dutch architect Francine Houben, Birmingham's spectacular new library will soon be open.

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The cities most frequently mentioned in books.

Infographic Assignment Florida Atlantic University Spring 2013 Professor: Jeane Cooper

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Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? […] Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking.

Christopher Hitchens

via Brain Pickings

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What people who don't write don't understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don't. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it's the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don't think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I've said. And I laugh at it, because I'm hearing it for the first time myself.

Woody Allen's interview in the September 2013 issue of Esquire.

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Little Free Library. This time on Mercer Street, NYC.

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Author Jane Austen to become face of British £10 note in 2017

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The Ambassade Hotel is a boutique hotel in the heart of Amsterdam.

Founded in 1953, The Ambassade Hotel was converted from 17th-century merchants' homes and into what today is among 10 separate buildings, all part of the hotel.

The Ambassade has an impressive collection of works from the European avant-garde movement, as well as a book collection. The latter consists of books by writers from 76 countries, as many of the books were signed first editions and donated by the authors themselves.

Some of the biggest literary names who have stayed at Ambassade include: Alberto Moravia, Saul Bellow, Günther Grass, Salman Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, Herta Müller, Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul, Amos Oz, among others.

Photo source

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“In 2003, Spain was one of three EU nations (together with Portugal and Greece) with the lowest average number of regular readers: just 47 per cent (compared to 70 per cent in Scandinavia and the UK) said they read at least one book a year. Now, though, that figure has risen to nearly 60 per cent.”

via The Millions

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I have just finished Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova. I had heard so many and so opposite opinions about the book that it felt like a reason on its own to read it in the end.

So this is a clear memoir, travelogue book. The first half of it reads easily, not to say that you flow through the pages. It is an interesting sneak in how a young, also obviously quite switch-on, person felt about the surrounding environment in the 80-90s, on the threshold of the collapse of the communist regime.

The second part is another story, though -  it is not anywhere near my literary taste. Party the reason might be because I am Bulgarian and have basic knowledge of our history, which is the focus in this part of the book.

Unfortunately, I didn't see an in-depth interpretation of the present through the prism of the past, which seems to have been the author's initial idea. To me, the main reason for this failure is Kassabova's inclination to criticize everything and everybody that is even slightly related to Bulgaria. This creates the unpleasant feeling of an outsider - who used to be part of that same environment - and just because is not anymore, looks at it with an eye of superiority. I think we have seen enough of this approach already.

The Balkan sulkiness, which every now and then the author points out as a main reason for Bulgaria's misfortunes, is deeply incarnated in her writing style. This felt unfair.

“I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer. But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other place and people, if you don't even know where you come from?" - Street Without a Name, Kapka Kassabova

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“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

George Eliot