Books And Birds

Come and celebrate ideas and aesthetics 🦋🕊🥀🐚❄️✨📿⚔️💝

[soracities]

Best books you've read written by women? I hate reading stuff written by men lately...

Fiction(ish)

The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa

A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Paris, When It's Naked, Etel Adnan

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood

The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney

The Doll's Alphabet, Camilla Grudova

Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado

The People in the Room, Norah Lange

Água Viva, Clarice Lispector

Collected Stories, Clarice Lispector

The Empty Book, Josefina Vicens

Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Helen Simpson

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The Waves and Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

Non-Fiction:

Second-hand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

Living, Thinking, Looking, Siri Hustvedt

Feel Free: Essays, Zadie Smith

The Need for Roots, Simone Weil

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg

An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schalansky

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Little Weirds, Jenny Slate

Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton

Poetry:

The War Works Hard, Dunya Mikhail

Barefoot Souls and A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor, Maram al-Masri

Tell Me and Wild Nights, Kim Addonizio

What the Living Do, Marie Howe

What We Carry, Dorianne Laux

Extracting the Stone of Madness, Alejandra Pizarnik

Poppies in Translation, Sujata Bhatt

The Neverfield: A Poem, Nathalie Handal

Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women

View with a Grain of Sand, Wislawa Szymborska

The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde

[soracities]

a few more!

Alligator & Other Stories, Dima Alzayat (everyone & their mother read this please)

They: A Sequence of Unease, Kay Dick

Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link

The Lonely City, Olivia Laing

The Fourth Island, Sarah Tolmie

On Photography, Susan Sontag

The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories, Angela Carter

The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter

My Brilliant Friend, ElenaFerrante

Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

All We Saw: Poems, Anne Michaels

[landsccape]

[hotgirlmuseboard]

[thepersonalquotes]

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

{Words by Charles Bukowski/ Mary Oliver from invitation}

[fromdarzaitoleeza]

{Charles Bukowski/Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet}

[withnailrules]

It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman dancing.

—Honore de Balzac

[fawnaura]

My limbs will grow along a sycamore tree. My heart will pour its earthly water upon one of the planets. What might I be in death after my death?

Mahmoud Darwish, “Mural” from Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: tr. & edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel—but a presence beyond desire of any sort. Intense emotions that have held us prisoner all our lives suddenly lose power, are uncloaked as tricks of memory, exposed as tireless, groping sensations whose function is to keep us distracted by the body’s appetites until the body is no more.”

— Simon Van Booy, from The Presence of Absence (Godine, 2022)

[flowerytale]

Robert Goolrick, from The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

[milkboydotnet]

“Apathy is a form of the inability to suffer. It is understood as a social condition in which people are so dominated by the goal of avoiding suffering that it becomes a goal to avoid human relationships and contacts altogether. In so far as the experiences of suffering, the pathai (Greek for the things that happen to a person, misfortunes) of life are repressed, there is a corresponding disappearance of passion for life and of the strength and intensity of its joys. Without question this ideal bears the imprint of middle-class consciousness.”

— Dorothee Sölle, Suffering

[weltenwellen]

Janelle Tan, from “Second Aubade for Singapore"

[hazystar]

[Text ID: most days i fight against my glass-like nature. most days i fight against the shatter. /End ID.]

[quotespile]

“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen — there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”

— Philip Roth, The Human Stain

[thepersonalquotes]

[metamorphesque]

― Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

[thepoetrytypewriter]

As I Walked Out One Evening

As I walked out one evening,   Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river   I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway:   ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you   Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain   And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean   Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking   Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,   For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages,   And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city   Began to whirr and chime: ‘O let not Time deceive you,   You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare   Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry   Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy   To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley   Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances   And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,   Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin   And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,   The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens   A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,   And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,   O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window   As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour   With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,   The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming,   And the deep river ran on.

//

W. H. Auden《Another Time》1940, United States

[thepoetrytypewriter]

It’s Raining (Il Pleut)

It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory And it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life O little drops Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below

//

Guillaume Apollinaire (Translated by Roger Shattuck) 《Calligrammes》1918, France

//

//

[patheticbookaddict]

“Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

~Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)