From the category archives:
While I was furtively ordering from Fresh Direct–I mean I do live a block or so from Zabars, Citarella and Fairway, but it was raining–I went to look for recipes and there, lo and behold were several recipes from cookbooks by…Crescent Dragonwagon, who is, as was recently mentioned in this very blog, Charlotte Zolotow’s daughter!
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The world is going to hell in a hand basket. That’s French for “Sarah Palin.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
There is a dumpster outside our door that is full of asbestos. Oh dear.
But, across the street, in front of what is an SRO that is being converted into a hotel for poor saps who
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What I saw this week:
I saw, and read, Joseph Roth’s brilliant collection of journalism (as it should be written) about pre world war II Berlin, called What I Saw. The Radeztky March by Joseph Roth is on of the great novels of the 20th century. I had never read his journalism, though. This book reminds
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I do miss independent bookstores. But I’m also lucky because I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Barnes and Nobles up here are awfully good ones. Still, a person misses a person’s local little bookstore. And a person often ends up ordering books on line. Especially old out-of-print books. And a
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Midnight’s Children won the 2008 Booker of Bookers Prize.(click here) I was thinking of Midnight’s Children, on eof my most beloved novels, yesterday as I watched Ghandi on TV. Reading it, all those many years ago, was a revelation, not just about India, but about novels. Reading Rushdie for the first time was like reading
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I did a reading in San Francisco that was a fundraiser for a group called Rocketdog. Rocketdog takes older, less obviously adoptable dogs and finds homes for them. The Booksmith is one of the country’s few remaining independent bookstores. Her is a picture of my handsome, attentive, gracious Rocketdog host, Sinbad, in this wonderful bookstore.
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A while ago Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote about Angela Thirkell in his column and I was jealous that he liked her so much because I had tried to read her stuff years ago and found it annoying and twee. But my friend Jeanette recently hunted up a bunch of the novels and passed them on to
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I was staying at a friend’s house when someone emailed me about an article she was translating from Italian into English which quoted some parts of Rameau’s Niece. The translator asked me to check some passages so that she would not be translating back into English from the Italian what had already been translated from
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I love that this is from a book published in 1889 called “The Home Manual. Everybody’s Guide in Social, Domestic, and Business Life.” Obviously this drawing is illustrating Business Life.
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Here is an artist who really understands what is to love a book, to get lost in a book, and how books follow us around. See more of her work by clicking here
(Thanks, design*sponge!)
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