#rules of civility

[ladythomasina]

my picks for @swiftiereaders' Album Challenge

some reasoning for each:

debut = Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery: a spirited and imaginative young girl grows up in the countryside (and it's green!)

Fearless = Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: now the girl is slightly older, but still creative and spirited. iconic emotions of American girlhood. falling in love with the boy next door. kissing in the rain.

Speak Now = I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith: another aspiring-writer heroine who romanticizes her life, but this time she gets a little more bruised by love. also this book is written in first person as Cassandra's diary, which ties into the "she wrote every song herself without collaborators" aspect of Speak Now

Red = The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford: we know this is a Taylor favorite because of her later song "The Bolter"! love continues to bruise our heroine, but she still wants it more than anything

1989 = Rules of Civility by Amor Towles: a twentysomething has madcap adventures with friends and boys in glamorous, shiny New York City

Reputation = The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid: our heroine has gotten a little hard-edged and cynical, the press has both praised her and hated her, but now she's taking control of the narrative and also admitting she is secretly vulnerable to love

Lover = A Room with a View by E.M. Forster: just an extremely sweet and optimistic love story. "You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal"

Folklore = Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: a lyrical, gothic masterpiece, highly attuned to nature. less romantic, and more sad and troubling, than its popular reputation might suggest. also the "nested stories" structure of the novel nods to the "storytelling" themes of the album.

Evermore = The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë: couldn't resist giving Folklore's sister album a novel by Emily Brontë's sister! another troubling gothic story, but it's a little overlooked/underrated compared to its predecessor

Midnights = Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney: millennials entering their 30s and ruminating over life, love, friendship, fame, and how they got to where they are

The Tortured Poets Department = Possession by A.S. Byatt: the story of the tortured romance between 2 Victorian poets, and the "modern idiots" who are researching it in the present day. very long, dense, lyrical, and kind of polarizing.

The Life of a Showgirl = City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert: my favorite novel about showgirls!

[beaquote]

In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

– Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles (2011)

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don't mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I'm talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine. Walking through an unsullied hour with an unsullied heart.

Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

[wellesleybooks]

Amor Towles checked in to the Beverly Hills Hotel to edit new novella

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with author Amor Towles about his new short story collection Table for Two and how his novella picked up Eve'

A new Amor Towles book makes us happy.

[marscia]

Current reads! Uni resumes for me in two weeks so I’m trying to squeeze in as much reading as I can before I get busy again. I seem to be enjoying Rules of Civility the most among these and at this point I’m so deeply immersed in the story that I just know it’s going to absolutely ruin me.

[theunbearablelightnessofreading]

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

Rating: 🌊🌊🌊🌊.7/5

Favorite Quote: “I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.”

A book that somehow ended up sitting in my tbr for far too long, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles proved to be one of the best reads I ever picked up.

At first glance Rules of Civility is about old New York glamour and one woman’s experience in this dazzling world. But of course it manages to be about so much more as secrets buried deep beneath all the dazzle rise to the surface and make themselves known.

My favorite thing about this book has to be the main character, Katey. Katey’s intelligent, well-read and knows how to hold her own. While she’s from more humble beginnings compared to most of the characters, the way she quickly picks up on ques around her and how she carries herself are qualities every modern woman should arm herself with. Especially in a world where things are seldom what they seem.

Set against post-Depression era New York and full of twists, witty conversations and a set of colorful characters, Rules of Civility contains life lessons for navigating different social circles and life in general. My highest rated book on booksfromthesea yet!

[foreverthirty1]

The rules of good comedy, in my mind, are pretty simple. Joke about your own tragedies and grief all you want. Punch it up. Make it uncomfortable if you want. Go for the extreme. Whatever you want.

Don't joke about other people's. And for the love of god don't do it in real time. People are putting their young children to bed right now, as I type this, with planes dropping bombs all around them. Singing lullabies and trying with every inch of themselves to smile and appear calm. Scared to put their children down for fear they'll never hold them again. Doing it anyway to try and pretend everything is OK so their children aren't scared too.

If they want to use morbid humor to get through this, that's their right. But you're not "getting through" anything right now. You're sitting in a safe space halfway around the world scrolling Twitter. So don't fucking make light of it.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[andreabadgley]

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane — in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath — she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger.

- Amor Towles, Rules of Civility