The Spine

Exploring the ways that reading shapes how we think, love, and live.

[bookwyvrn]

booklr follow train 🎉

goal: to connect and find other book blogs on tumblr since a lot of new bloggers are joining this dumb website

rulebook:

reblog this post

check out @bookwyvrn & perhaps give me a follow

follow at least 5 others who reblogged this

have fun!!!!

thanks for joining! and i love that you're part of this great community! 🎉

[thenordroom]

30 Home Library Design Ideas - THE NORDROOM

[thespineshow]

I feel smarter imagining myself in this chair.

[thespineshow]

You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last 'well' in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things.

Paul Graham

[thespineshow]

New guests Coco Hames & Krista Bremer

Sure, she’s the front-woman of the garage-pop combo The Ettes, but Coco Hames is also a big-time reader. We talk on Skype today about the unique way that fiction — and for Coco, especially fantasy— can take you away from reality to a place that, somehow, feels even more real.

Krista Bremer, the author of “A Tender Struggle,” conveyed a similar sentiment when she spoke of the importance of getting so caught up in a story that you forget you are reading.

Both women, and more, coming to The Spine podcast soon!

[thespineshow]

Finally getting to Ms. Pearlman's short story collection. 🙋(high-five) Taking this baby on the ✈️ Sunday! . . #keepreading #podcast #readingonmaui #booksbooksbooks #mauilife

[thespineshow]

Reading situation 1

[thespineshow]

Books can’t install unknown feelings or passions into us. What they can do is develop our emotional, psychological and intellectual life, and, by doing so, show us how and to what extent we are connected.

Hisham Matar in The New York Times

[thespineshow]

A Maui book sale: paradise in paradise 📚🌺 #keepreading #readingonmaui #thespineshow #mauilife #booksbooksbooks #minicooper #happyplace

[thespineshow]

Why I stopped thinking about what I read, and what I did about it

With only a dog to take care of and a work schedule that I control, I have time to read. That’s not new. I’ve long been a consumer of words. 

The new part is this: I’ve been forgetting what I read. Someone will ask about the last book I finished, and I can’t recall the title, author, nothing. It’s like it never happened.

Is this early-onset old age? No. We’re encouraged to consume, not to consider, and I’d fallen into that pattern. I like seeing the numbers on my Goodread’s “Read” page go up. I talk to writers all the time who suggest life-changing books, and I can’t wait to dig in. And the library lets me take all the books I want FOR FREE! (For a while, anyway.)

So, lately, I’ve been setting aside time to think about what I’m reading. Sometimes I think while walking or doing some mundane task like folding laundry. Other times I think while snuggling with my old dog or sitting at the beach — though I may want to turn on a podcast or check Twitter, I don’t. I tell myself, “Gail, this is the thinking time.” 

The difference this makes is obvious: When I let a book’s ideas simmer, its characters hang out together in my head, its settings become familiar spaces, a book becomes the book. I remember it. And it is far more likely to change me than if I’d merely read it.

THIS is why I read. How did I forget this?

[thespineshow]

The Spine, one more time

Last fall, I took the show off WHUP because I was trying to build a freelancing business and set up my life on Maui. Six months later, I miss the show more than I care about building a freelance business, and I bought a condo. 

So. I’m bringing back The Spine!

Stay tuned — good stuff is on the way, including more interviews, a Twitter thing, probably something on Facebook Live, and who knows what else.

[thespineshow]

All it takes to start reading a lot more is to take 'empty time' spent Twitter-stalking celebrities or watching Desperate Housewives and convert some of it to reading time.

Charles Chu in Quartz

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She reads anything and everything and even now hates to be disturbed and above all however often she has read a book and however foolish the book may be no on must make fun of it or tell her how it goes on. It is still as it always was real to her.

Gertrude Stein (about herself), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

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E40 Reading List: Michele Filgate

If you want to keep up with what Michele is reading, follow her on Instagram, where, as @readandbreathe, she often posts photos of the books in her “TBR” pile (that’s “to be read,” of course). But here are the books and writers we spoke about on The Spine.

Books

Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

Matilda by Roald Dahl

The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespear

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard (specifically, the story called “Cousins”)

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal 

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf The Waves by Virginia Woolf

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg

Writers

Charles Simic

Mekeel McBride

Maggie Nelson

Eileen Myles

Marilynn Robinson

[thespineshow]

Writer and reader Michele Filgate credits her grandmother for generating her love for books; for Michele's 10th birthday, she even paid Michele's $100 library fee. Who does she consider "the patron saint of book worms"? What kind of fan fiction did Michele write as a kid? And what was her role in Paul Harding's "Tinkers" winning the Pulitzer Prize for literature? You'll have to listen to find out.

[thespineshow]

E39 Reading List: Lynn Melnick

Lynn was on “The Spine” shortly after election day in 2016. It was both a relief and a welcome distraction to hear her calm, sweet voice talk about books and reading. Here are the books and writers she mentioned.

Books/Poems

Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning by Alice Walker 

Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch by Diane Wakoski

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

The Zoo Story by Edward Albee Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee The Goat Who is Sylvia by Edward Albee

Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

Writers

Audre Lorde

Maya Angelou

Miguel de Cervantes

Rita Dove 

Maria Baracca

Stephen Dunn

Marie Howe

[thespineshow]

Lynn Melnick is the author of "Landscape with Sex and Violence" and "If I Should Say I Have Hope" (both by YesYes Books), and the co-editor of "Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation" (by Viking, 2015). She teaches poetry at the 92Y and has mentored at Girls Write Now. She grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn. On "The Spine," she talks about her reading story. Her conversation with Gail Marie was recorded the day after election day, 2016.

[thespineshow]

E38 Reading List — Kyle Dargan

His cousin’s comic book collection was a source of Kyle’s first reading obsession. Poetry came later.

Books

Spider-Man comics

Wolverine comics

Captian America comics

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois  Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois 

Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka

Watchmen by Alan Moore 

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

The Genuine Negro Hero by Thomas Sayers Ellis 

Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes 

Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa

Glass Town by Lisa Russ Spaar

Look by Solmaz Sharif

Forest Primeval by Vievee Francis

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation by Susan J. Napier

Writers

Walter Mosley

Eric Van Lustbader (The Ninja series)

Langston Hughes

Chinua Achebe

Rita Dove

Billy Collins

Saul Williams