As it’s the app store’s 15th birthday I’m seeing a lot of screenshots of peoples first App Store downloads and here’s mine!
My grandmother’s copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare, from 1924—given to me recently by my mum. It wasn’t in the best shape with some loose pages and tape holding the spine in place. I took it to a shop that repairs old books and they patched it up nicely.
Current audiobook library loan: Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian 📚👂
Want to read: This Little Art by Kate Briggs 📚
“…an intricately structured and finely crafted work that manages to feel refreshingly impromptu…”, says Marisa Grizenko in the latest edition of Plain Pleasures, her book review newsletter. I recommend subscribing!
This Little Art is novel length essay about the trials and tribulations of translation. The publishers blurb calls it “…a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation…”.
On a whim I checked the library to see if they have a copy—it turns out, yes they do!—so I scooped it up and since this book comes with a deadline I’m actually going to read it now and not two years from now as would likely be the case if I’d found a second hand copy.
Some recent purchaes from Paperhound bookshop in Vancouver: Ginzburg, Lem and a Tuttle paperback about myths and legends of Hawaii.
Rebecca Solnit on walking and hoping, two aspects of the same path
“…whose reward is arrival in the unanticipated, and whose very nature is in contrast with the tenor of our time, a time preoccupied with the arrival and the quantifiable. Many love certainty so much more than possibility that they choose despair [emphasis added], itself a form of certainty that the future is notable and known.”
It feels like Solnit is staring into my soul! Originally from an essay in a book called Sole/Soul Sermons. I took it from a longer excerpt in chapter six of Jenny Odell’s new book Saving Time.
I Am!
By John Clare
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Currently reading: Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon 📚
Reading The Strangers in the House for a bookclub in June and while I wait for that to arrive I’m reading one of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret stories—my first. I was slightly put off at the start but it’s reeling me in as I go.
