The library, and step on it!

a.k.a. The Narratologist. A blog about books. May include brilliant insights, not-so-brilliant insights, reading lists, articles, quotes, photosets, reviews, and passionate arguments about which Austen man is the dreamiest (Mr Tilney). The sidebar gif was made by eudaimonium.

[contremineur]

The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a 1920 letter (written under quarantine in the south of France during the outbreak of Spanish influenza)

[arrghigiveup]

[source]

[readlenin]

[dsu2014]

i fucking love marking my books up and underlining lines that make my heart hurt even if the line is crooked or moves into the text a bit, even if i can see it on the back of the page! i love folding down the corners of the pages so i know where the lines that I really love are and i love bracketing off paragraphs that are so good theyre too long to underline every sentence and folding one side of the book back a bit as i read and not being afraid to physically mark MY book up and engage with it and give it all of my love . ultimate move is sharing your annotated and marked up book w someone u love so they can see everything u love in the book and its like… intimate

[lestempsdereveur]

Curiosity. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes "concern"; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent "bad" information from invading and suffocating the "good." Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibilities of coming and goings.

Michel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher

[mysharona1987]

[fymodernflapper]

Agatha Christie at the window of her house in Derbyshire (1913).

[claycoloredmotherlessness-deact]

you introduced my girl to slavoj žižek while i was in jail bro no i do not want to hang

[horatieau]

in honor of valentine’s day please enjoy this absolutely savage moment from anne of green gables

[to-be-loved-by-death]

So I may have found the best headline ever

[vintagebooksdesign]

VINTAGE CLASSICS JAPANESE SERIES

Vintage books presents the newest set of beautiful, design-led collectible editions from some classic Japanese authors:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami 9781784875411

The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki 9781784875435

Out - Natsuo Kirino 9781784875404

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea – Yukio Mishima 9781784875428

The Housekeeper and the Professor -  Yoko Ogawa 9781784875442

The 5 book collection has been illustrated by New York based Japanese artist Yuko Shimizu and is available now.

[myrosecolouredgirl]

so Charlotte Bronte read Emma by Jane Austen and was really interested in this minor character named Jane Fairfax who was poor and would have been a governess had she not married well and then Bronte wrote her own novel exploring the plight of the poor governess who married this guy named Edward Fairfax Rochester in a novel called Jane Eyre and my point is don’t let anyone tell you shit about fanfiction.

[andruwminyrd]

read in 2019. rebecca by daphne du maurier

last night i dreamt i went to manderley again.

[barcarole]

Dostoevsky’s notebook from 1870-1871. Sketches for Demons. Russian State Library, Moscow.

[the-library-and-step-on-it]

Just as this island belongs to the gulls, and the gulls to their cry and their cry to the wind and the wind to no one, So is this island the gulls, and the gulls are their cry and their cry is the wind and the wind no one’s.

Herman de Coninck.

[tothewordgarden]

“But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.” -Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

[loonarry]

Harry Potter and his vehement hatred of Luna Lovegood’s radish earrings: a leitmotif that spans across three (3) books