a personal history of rereading

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London readers continue to browse at a bombed-out library, WWII. 

[unravelingsofanarrator]

Some of my newest #toreads I’m on a #Fitzgerald kick right now so I decided to buy the Love of the Last Tycoon and a little short story collection. I bought Of Love and Other Demons because I’ve been meaning to read another Marquez book for awhile now, that as well as Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, and I got Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the Revenant because they’re both books that have movie adaptations I’m interested in seeing! Hope to get to them all soon! #books #bookstagram

[summerisaboutreading]

A fabulous stack of books; Wise Blood in particular is amazing.

[eveninglesbian-deactivated20180]

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Sylvia Plath, excerpt of “Fever 103°,” Ariel  (via middecember)

[penguinrandomhouse]

This may well be my favorite comma in all of literature. It’s not grammatically necessary; you might, if you were so inclined (I’m not), argue that it’s incorrect. But here it is, the last breath of the paragraph, and I like to think that it’s SJ’s way of saying, “This is your last chance to set this book down and go do something else, like work in your garden or go down the street for an ice cream cone. Because from this point on it’s just you, and me, and whatever it is that walks, and walks alone, in Hill House.” I don’t think that anyone’s going anywhere. Right?

Shirley Jackson’s Sublime First Graf in ‘Hill House’, Annotated

We asked Random House copy chief Ben Dreyer to annotate the eerily memorable and exceptionally well-constructed first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and it’s just marvelous.

(via penguinrandomhouse)

[summerisaboutreading]

[summerisaboutreading]

Undelivered letters shed light on 17th-century society

Thousands of pieces of correspondence, many still unopened, were stored away by Dutch postmaster and are now being examined by academics

[summerisaboutreading]

Poetry as revolution.

[t-ears-blog]

[summerisaboutreading]

"I do just like to write long sentences. The longer it goes, the more musical it has to become, the stronger it has to be."

Terrance Hayes, at a reading in October, 2015

[summerisaboutreading]

"I want to be as inexplicable as something hanging a dozen feet in the air."

Terrance Hayes, at a reading in  October, 2015

[summerisaboutreading]

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.” —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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Amy Winehouse is not a book, but I love her. This is scarily beautiful.

[summerisaboutreading]

Hiking in the colors.

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Why This Grown-up Reads YA

When I was a senior in high school, I took a class on Freud in which we read Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, published not so many years earlier in 1982. Gilligan traced the history of the way in which a female mode of thinking, especially about moral dilemmas, had been diminished and misunderstood... Read More »

[summerisaboutreading]

William Boyd: Why John le Carré is more than a spy novelist

What Joseph Conrad started, John le Carré enshrined and made modern.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

But I’d say you must die a little, have a book of matches go off in your hand, see your best friend copying your exam, visit an Indian reservation and see their plastic feathers, the dead dream. One must be a prisoner just once to hear the lock twist into his gut. After all that one is free to grasp at the trees, the stones, the sky, the birds that make sense out of air.

Anne Sexton, from The Evil Seekers (via violentwavesofemotion)

[romanimp]

I can’t wait for the days where scholarship has to muddle through ff.net and ao3 pseudonyms like “guys, I have evidence to believe that starfucker69 was a pseudonym for one of our landmark literary figures of the 21st century and that they in fact first began their writing career with filthy sinful Steggy smut.”