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The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen

Posted in BookLove news, Chick Lit, Fiction, Liked it, tagged book review, book reviews, books, c, Fiction, North Carolina Writers, reading, reviews on April 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »

I’ll keep this review short and sweet — kind of like Sarah Addison Allen’s books. This is Allen’s third book and much like Garden Spells and The Sugar Queen, it has elements of fairy tale mixed with small town North Carolina flavor and a pinch of romance. Emily Benedict returns to quirky Mullaby, North Carolina in [...]

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Quick! Name 10 books….

Posted in BookLove news on August 7, 2009 | 6 Comments »

….that will stick with you forever. Don’t think too hard about it – they aren’t necessarily the best books but the ones that you never forget. Here are mine: 1. Life of Pi 2. City of Thieves 3. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee 4. Follow the River 5. Little House on the Prairie [...]

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Booklove tweets!

Posted in BookLove news on July 7, 2009 | 1 Comment »

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New Reviewer on board!

Posted in BookLove news on October 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

We are excited to have a new review contributor on board. We look forward to reviews from allTheWayFromLongview. It will be great to have a male perspective and the addition of more reviews of non-fiction titles. Read a message from our newest reviewer on the About the Reviewers page. Welcome Longview!

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One Year of BookLove

Posted in BookLove news on September 4, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Well it’s been a year since the launch of BookLove and I couldn’t be happier with the response we have received. Thanks to Book Dragon for all the great reviews and thanks to all of you for reading and responding to our posts. Stay tuned for new reviews (and reviewers!) in the year to come!

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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 the ‘BookLove news’ Category

The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen

Quick! Name 10 books….

Booklove tweets!

New Reviewer on board!

One Year of BookLove

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