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Archive for December, 2007

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman

Posted in Book Dragon's reviews, Liked it, Nonfiction, tagged Christianity, Ebionites, gnosis, Gnostic, Gnostic Christianity, Marcionites on December 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Well, this one sat on the nightstand for a long time, but it’s actually a really accessible book on the subject of Gnostic Christianities, although I must say for an outstanding introduction to Gnostic Christianity, someone would be best off to begin with Elaine Pagels’ most excellent, The Gnostic Gospels. However, Ehrman’s book is very [...]

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The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Posted in Chick Lit, Fiction, Loved it, booklove's reviews, tagged book reviews, books, ghosts, gothic, Jane Eyre, reading on December 11, 2007 | 1 Comment »

Every once in awhile I find a book that puts me into a quandary. Do I keep reading, discovering what’s around the next corner (or page as the case may be), or do I ration it out, chapter by chapter, prolonging the enjoyment? This book caused me just such a dilemma. Margaret Lea, an unassuming, [...]

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Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

Posted in Book Dragon's reviews, Fiction, Loved it, tagged Binewski's Fabulon, carnival, carnivals, carny, freak shows, freaks, side-show, side-shows on December 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment »

Moving can have very real benefits such as when I opened a box of long forgotten books and rediscovered Geek Love. From the moment that Olympia Binewski opens her tale all the way to the twisted end, I could not put this book down, not the first time I read it, nor the second time, nor for [...]

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BOOKLOVE

by Jerome Stern

I have just come from an exhibition that told me that books will be replaced by electronic libraries,
talking videos,
interactive computers,
cd-roms with thousands of volumes,
gigabytes of memory dancing on pixillated screens at which we will blearily stare into eternity.
And so, in the face of the future, I must sing the song of the book.

Nothing more voluptuous do I know than sitting with bright pictures,
fat upon my lap,
and turning glossy pages of giraffes and Gauguins,
penguins and pyramids.

I love wide atlases delineating the rise and fall of empires,
the trade routes from Kashgar to Samarkand.

I love heavy dictionaries,
their tiny pictures,
complicated columns,
minute definitions of incarnative and laniary, hagboat and fopdoodle.

I love the texture of pages,
the highgloss slickness of magazines as slippery as oiled eels,
the soft nubble of old books,
delicate india paper,
so thin my hands tremble trying to turn the fluttering dry leaves,
and the yellow cheap, coarse paper of mystery novels so gripping that I don’t care that the plane circles Atlanta forever,
because it is a full moon and I am stalking in the Arizona desert a malevolent shape-shifter.

I love the feel of ink on the paper,
the shiny varnishes,
the silky lacquers,
the satiny mattes.

I love the press of letters in thick paper,
the roughness sizzles my fingers with centuries of craft embedded in pulped old rags,
my hands caress the leather of old bindings crumbling like ancient gentlemen.

The books I hold for their heft,
to riff their pages,
to smell their smoky dustiness,
the rise of time in my nostrils.

I love bookstores,
a perfect madness of opportunity,
a lavish feast eaten by walking up aisles,
and as fast as my hand reaches out,
I reveal books’ intimate innards,
a doleful engraving of Charlotte Corday who murdered Marat,
a drawing of the 1914 T-head Stutz Bearcat whose owners shouted at rivals,
“There never was a car worser than the Mercer.”

I sing these pleasures of white paper and black ink,
of the small jab of the hard cover corner at the edge of my diaphragm,
of the look of type,
of the flip of a page,
the sinful abandon of the turned down corner,
the reckless possessiveness of my marginal scrawl,
the cover picture—as much a part of the book as the contents itself,
like Holden Caulfield his red cap turned backwards, staring away from us,
at what we all thought we should become.

And I also love those great fat Bibles evangelists wave like otter pelts,
the long graying sets of unreadable authors,
the tall books of babyhood enthusiastically crayoned,
the embossed covers of adolescence,
the tiny poetry anthologies you could slip in your pocket,
and the yellowing cookbooks of recipes for glace blanche dupont and Argentine mocha toast,
their stains and spots souvenirs of long evenings full of love and argument,
and the talk, like as not,
of books, books, books.

First aired as a monologue on National Public Radio. Author Jerome Stern was the director of the writing program at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Fall in book love

Want to find time to read?

Fall in book love.

Seek out the books that fire your passions.

Follow your intellect and your heart.

Then time will find you.

Steve Leveen in The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life.
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Archive for December, 2007

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

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