Month: May 2020

Not exactly wuxia, not exactly unwelcome.

On By altlovesbooksIn book musings, finishedLeave a comment

What up book nerds! I realize I’ve been quiet for a week or more now, but we had a hot water heater breathe its last breath (gurgle its last….gurgle?) and I’ve been helping my husband with the fallout projects. I’m getting a new laundry area out of the deal, so it felt appropriate to pitch in.

Unfortunately because I’ve been doing that, I haven’t had as much time to read as I normally do, and I’ve been reading some truly monster-sized books, so my forward progress on my book goals for the year is basically nil. I did, however, have an ARC opportunity fall in my lap for Zen Cho’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Tor/Forge publishing, and I couldn’t pass up a cover like that. It’s gorgeous. Fortunately it was also a short novella (I think it came in at 160 pages or something like that), so I was able to knock it out in a few days.

The book blurb claimed it was for wuxia fans, but I found very little wuxia in the actual book. For people who are unaware of what the wuxia genre is, it’s a Chinese word literally translated as “martial heroes” and encompasses martial arts adventures. Think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or any other movie/book you’ve read where the weapons and moves are all named, the action is exaggerated and fantastical, and sometimes there’s some humor involved. This novella had very little of any of that, but despite not getting what I was expecting, I greatly enjoyed my time with this book. Where I expected fantastical fight scenes, I got a quiet and thoughtful story about motives, relationships, theology, and what makes a family. The author also includes some LGBT themes which I think were handled well. I’m taking great care to not leave spoilers here, but I will say that I found the ending touching and a satisfying conclusion to this short novella.

In terms of shortcomings, I will say that this book was light on descriptions and details. Places, actions, and characters are all very minimally introduced and described, which sometimes made it difficult for me to “see” how things were playing out. Things also (by novella necessity, I guess) play out rather quickly, and some character developments and motives take place more rapidly than maybe is believable. I found it easy to overlook a lot of these flaws, though, because I was enjoying the novella so much.

I rated this 4 stars on Goodreads for how much I enjoyed it despite not finding the wuxia elements I expected based on the blurb. I took a star off for those missing elements, and also the minor shortcomings I pointed out above. If anything I’ve said here sounds interesting to you (even if it’s the cover art alone), I recommend giving this novella a try. Let me know what you think!

What I’ve been reading this week.

On By altlovesbooksIn book musings, bookish commentary, currently readingLeave a comment

I haven’t forgotten about this already, I swear. I was feeling under the weather this weekend, and didn’t have the energy to post. We’re back to our regularly unscheduled program now, or should be anyway.

Just to touch on briefly what I’ve been reading, here’s a weekly(ish) roundup! I’ll try and do this weekly, but we’ll see how things go. I have post ideas lined up, I just have to actually, y’know, do the thing about writing them.

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (pg. 343/1276)

I’m making good time through this book, despite it being so long and taking some time off the last few days to rest. It’s a surprisingly easy read for it being both a classic book and so long, but I suppose if it were boring and dense I wouldn’t be bothering with it. The plot lagged a little in the beginning while the author set the stage, but now that Dantes is well on his path of benevolence and revenge it’s moving fairly quickly. I’m super interested to see how he deals with the people who wronged him, as up until now he’s just been visiting kindness on his friends and benefactors. I also am very unfamiliar with the plot past this point, so I’m excited to fill in this huge book-shaped hole in my classics knowledge.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami (pg. 146/607)

On the other side of the coin, I’m slowly making my way through this book. It’s a good book, but deep, and requires my two brain cells to do more than they’re accustomed to in order to really get meaning out of what I’m reading. Because I was sick I put this one on the back burner a little bit, but I’m eager to put some serious time into it. I’ll be up front and say that it isn’t grabbing me as much as other Murakami books have, but someone on my Instagram post (@eric.in.words) pointed out that it’s a book that you don’t realize you like it so much until you’re done with it. I pondered that for a minute and realized that that’s my feelings for a lot of his works. They aren’t in-the-moment grabbers, but books you think a lot about when you’re done. It was encouraging to hear, and I’m planning on enjoying the ride and assessing my feelings about it when I’m done.

And that’s really all I made progress on this week. I also have an audiobook on hold, but because I haven’t really gone anywhere (thanks COVID-19!) I haven’t really had an opportunity to finish it off.

Thanks to my cat Cleo for being such a patient book prop.

Why I’m interested in The Pavement Bookworm, and you should be too.

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In my quest for more blog material, I stumbled on an Instagram photo posted by @thediaryofaclassteacher with a guy sitting on a curb in South Africa, a stack of books at his side, and the caption claiming that he reviews books for anyone passing by who’s interested. I, a born-and-bred internet skeptic, thought to myself, “nahhhh this photo’s either staged or misrepresented or something“. You should always be wary of something you read on the internet, but maybe not in this case.

Meet Philani Dladla, resident of Johannesburg, South Africa. Formerly homeless, formerly addicted to drugs, and survivor of an extremely difficult life on the streets, he decided he needed to save himself and make something of himself — and he did that through books. Refusing to beg and with a book collection he had been carefully creating and reading since the age of 12, Philani created a mobile library. Not only lending books, he started reading and reviewing his books, using those reviews to entice motorists along Empire Road in Johannesburg.

Philani’s story made it out of Johnnesburg thanks to a documentary filmmaker Tebogo Malope, who interviewed Philani and posted the interview video online. Viral videos being what they are, his story about surviving a life of homelessness and drug addiction through his love of books spread quickly.

He published an autobiography in 2015 called “The Pavement Bookworm”, and many people call it extremely inspiring. I’ve added it to my To Read list and hope to get to it soon. He also has a charity page up where he lists some of his book reviews, and raises money and book donations to help pay it forward to other struggling adults and children in South Africa.

Noteworthy links:

SA People News: The unlikely story of The Pavement Bookworm

Pavement Bookworm: Official Site

Philani Dladla TED Talk, 2014 Johannesburg

Happy birthday, Patience and Fortitude!

On By altlovesbooksIn bookish placesLeave a comment

I have never made the pilgrimage to the New York Public Library, but I’ve seen enough movies and looked at enough images to recognize the two iconic lion statues out front. In fact, Fortitude in particular played a large part of my childhood for his opening shot in Ghostbusters. At the time, though, I had no idea they had names, and it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I learned that these two iconic statues had names. Meet Patience (on the south side of the entrance) and Fortitude (on the north side of the entrance).

This majestic pair happens to be 109 years old today, and were carved by the Piccirilli Brothers in 1911. The Piccirilli Brothers were paid $5,000 for their contribution to the New York Public Library’s front door, and they carved them out of pink Tennessee Marble. They’ve been cleaned and restored periodically throughout their lives, most recently in 2019.

What I hadn’t known until researching this pair was that Patience and Fortitude are not their original names. Instead, they were named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after the founders of the New York Public Library (John Jacob Astor and James Lenox). Their names were changed in the 1930s by the mayor of New York to Patience and Fortitude, because he felt these were two qualities the residents needed to get through the Great Depression.

So give a thought to this majestic pair of library mascots on this day, the day of their christening, as you open your book to read. They’ve seen over a century(!) of New York history and become an iconic representation of one of the best-known libraries in the United States. It’s pretty incredible when you think about it!

For some further reading:

New York Public Library: The Library Lions

New York Public Library: The New York Public Library’s Iconic Lions Are Restored, Repaired, and Ready to Roar

Classic New York History: New York Public Library Lions: Patience and Fortitude

Top Cats: The Life and Times of the New York Public Library Lions

I’m here to ruin the magic of book covers.

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The phrase “never judge a book by its cover” doesn’t really mean a whole lot in the literary world. Books live and die by how eye-catching and unique their covers are, how well they stick out to consumers browsing bookshelves. Imagine the last time you were in a bookstore, library, or otherwise browsing books. Was it a particular color, a particular style, a particular layout that made you pull that copy off the shelf? I’d like to say that I’m immune to all the gimmicks publishers use to get someone to buy their books, but I’m just as guilty as the next person of being suckered into pulling a book off a shelf solely based on the cover.

I never really stopped to consider what goes into the making of a book cover, and maybe assumed (naively?) that it was like any other art form — each was its own unique snowflake in a blizzard called a bookstore. But then my friends started reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (which I also read back in 2017) and one of them pointed out that the cover looked familiar to another book they knew of. Suddenly, the magic of book covers was ruined for me. And now I’m here to ruin it for anyone else who was like me, with literary blinders on.

What I learned from probing a bit deeper into this strange new factoid I had stumbled on is that, much like anything else in the modern world, book covers rely heavily on templates and stock photography. The same small cohort of photographers crop up time and time again in the credits of book cover images, and their photographs are added to stock image packages that many designers pull from. These stock images are then applied again and again, because if it isn’t broke, why fix it?

Like most things in life now, the essence of a book cover has been distilled and watered down by marketing professionals everywhere to include only the basic items necessary to appeal to the most adults possible (curiously, children’s and YA books seem immune to this formulaic approach). Book covers go through trends, where some years the fad is handscript titles with simple handmade illustrations (think John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars), other years the single-object-on-white-background is appealing (Malcom Gladwell says hi). When marketers and book designers tap into these trends, they tend to run with them, and run them into the ground. What we’re left with in today’s world of same-ism are a lot of covers that start to become indistinguishable from each other.

My dad had a wall of books when I was growing up, mostly pulp sci-fi from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I remember looking through a lot of those book covers and wondering at how different they all were from each other. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this trend of book cover cloning before, but now that it’s been pointed out to me, I can’t unsee it. Certainly there’s exceptions to the rule, but the bestsellers all have similar covers. Probably for a reason.

Interesting related links:

Entertainment Weekly: Books with strangely similar covers

Eye on Design: Why do so many book covers look the same? Blame Getty Images

The Atlantic: Book cover clones: Why do so many recent novels look alike?

The New Yorker: The decline and fall of the book cover

What I’ve been reading this week.

On By altlovesbooksIn book musings, bookish commentary, currently reading2 Comments

I’m still in the process of cementing a schedule for this blog, but one of the things I do want to consistently include is a weekly recap of what I’ve been reading. I think this will let me better cement my thoughts about my books, and you guys are a captive audience anyway and are subject to my whims and fancy. I’m thinking Saturday is a good day for this, mostly because today is Saturday and it seemed like a good idea today. This is how most of my ideas work, actually. I’ll try and keep it spoiler free as best I can.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami (pg. 56/607)

Not the easiest author to read, but still consistently one of my favorites. Haruki Murakami’s style is very surreal, and can be a lot to unpack sometimes. Even though The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of his better known works (and highly rated), it’s taken me several years to finally sit down and read it. I’m not very far in, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far. I’ve never been good at deep diving into what an author really means and tracking down each obscure reference, so a lot of my experience with Murakami is at face value. Nevertheless, his descriptions and writing style of even the most mundane actions never fail to pull me in and let me live life alongside the main character. It’s not the most action-oriented book ever (so far?), but I’m still enjoying it.

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (pg. 52/1276(!!!))

The longest book I’ve ever sat down to read, by quite a few hundred pages (I think the longest up ’til now was Brent Weeks’ The Burning White at 992). It’s always been one of those books I felt like I should read but never had the time to. Luckily for me, my friends at the Book Lover’s Club Discord server started a buddy read of this doorstop of a book this month, with the intent of us all finishing it by the end of June. I remain cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to meet this deadline.

So far not a lot has been going on in the book, but I’m only 52 pages in (that’s 4% for anyone keeping track at home). I’ve just been introduced to a lot of the main players, the plot has been set up by the antagonists, and partially executed. I look forward to seeing where “The Count” comes in, what/where “Monte Cristo” is (other than a sandwich), and how our protagonist handles things. I know very little specifics about the plot, so I’m going in mostly blind.

Refuse to Choose! – Barbara Sher (83%)

I made a blog post about this book specifically earlier this week so I’ll keep this brief-ish. I’ve read a lot since even the post I made, and have come away with a lot of different noteworthy realizations and practices that will maybe help going forward. I don’t really know what the end goal of this is, since I have a career goal I’m excited about and a tolerant husband who lets me indulge most of my whims, but having some additional organizational tools in my arsenal might help going forward.

In addition to the realization that I’m a “scanner”, the book also drilled down and explored the different types of “scanners” and how they tick. I’m a bit of a Sybil (major clutter problem, pulled in a million different project directions at once and act on none of them, afraid I’ll never complete anything), a Jack-of-all-Trades (good at a lot of things I try but never master any, wish I had a passion in just one thing), and a Wanderer (interested in unrelated activities/knowledge for no reason, intrigued by things other people find boring, lack direction). From these chapters, I also started creating a OneNote board outlining all the different projects I’d like to work on, and some information about each of them. I also split apart “work” projects from “play” projects because I felt like the distinction was necessary. One of the quotes the author related from someone she interviewed really hit home especially hard:

“I sat in the middle of all the things I’d started and dropped, and they seemed like a worthless waste of time.”

Barbara Sher, “Refuse to Choose!” pg. 37

This is a deep fear of mine. I’ve never really wanted fame, fortune, or a ton of recognition for anything I do, but I do desperately want to matter. I want to leave behind something that someone else finds value in, even if it’s just a small project at work (or a vanity blog on the internet, apparently). I have started so many projects that I’ve just dropped for no reason other than losing interest, forgetting about it, or getting discouraged. This book really outlined a lot of my fears in a clear way, and it’s giving me tools to address some of them. I can’t really ask for anything more than that from a book.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to this week! Have you been reading anything? Let me know in the comments!

Cool bookstore, hot backstory.

On By altlovesbooksIn bookish places3 Comments

In my quest to find interesting content for this blog of mine, I stumbled across this image of an arched doorway made of books, posted on Instagram by @enchantedlibraries. My mind went in two directions — first, are those books secured? And second, where is this bookstore located?

While I was not able to answer the first question based on careful examination of so many different Google images of the same arch (I’m willing to start a GoFundMe so I can answer this question in person), I learned a lot about the actual location in pursuit of the second question, and uncovered a neat story to boot.

To get the immediate questions out of the way first, this is a bookshop called Le Bal des Ardents located in Lyons, France, along the Rue Neuve (temporarily closed currently due to COVID-19). People call the bookshop small, quaint, but very distinctive in terms of its entryway and picturesque interior. It evidently champions the small, unknown authors and independent publishers, which I greatly respect.

The cool (ha!) story comes in when I started looking into the actual name and what it meant (because I don’t speak a word of French beyond food names). The name translates in English to “the dance of the burning ones”, and strangely enough has nothing to do with books. Le Bal des Ardents (otherwise known as Dance of the Savages) evidently was a masquerade ball held in 1393. People partied hard back then apparently, as all of the partygoers were dressed impersonating savages. The costumes they wore were extremely flammable (I imagine due to the materials used at the time), and several partygoers were carrying torches to complete the ensemble. I imagine you can see where this is going, but just in case, it was the King’s (Charles VI) brother who carried the fateful torch that really, ah, turned up the heat at the party. After the conclusion of the, ah, “dance of the burning ones”, only the King and one other dancer survived.

So there you have it! A really neat looking bookshop with a kind of morbid-but-fascinating name! I don’t see myself in Lyons anytime soon, but just in case, this place would be something I’d check out.

References and cool places to check out related to the bookshop:

Le Bal des Ardents Official Page

Le Bal des Ardents: Is This the Prettiest Bookshop in Lyon?

Bibliophile’s Corner: Le Bal des Ardents Bookstore

On the Grid: Le Bal des Ardents

Famous people read books too. Or pose in front of them, at least.

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The New York Times did an article last week concerning celebrity shelfies. Evidently during certain speaking engagements, celebrities have been using books as backdrops and sharp-eyed viewers have been picking apart their contents. Some results are surprising, some are not.

Most of the results are rather bland (maybe Cate Blanchett really likes reading the OED?), but I did add a few books to my to-read shelf on Goodreads. Carla Hayden in particular had an interesting book spotted on her shelf called “Heart of Ngoni” by Harold Courlander & Ousmane Sako that I may try and squeeze in soon. I haven’t read anything from Africa yet.

Prince Charles’ fascination with horses simultaneously surprises me and does not. He seems like a horse guy.

The New York Times: What Do Famous People’s Bookshelves Reveal?

How interesting the places not here.

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I’m fascinated with other cultures. My list of books read about places other than America spans across so many different countries and time periods that I’m not sure I could list them all right now. Historical fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, I don’t discriminate.

In particular, a lot of my bookish cultural wanderings take me to places in Asia. I’m not sure why, but each of the distinct countries in Asia feel so especially exotic to me. I’ve read many non-fiction and memoir books from North Korean refugees. I love Haruki Murakami’s fiction. I have a ton of Chinese historical fiction read and yet to read on my Goodreads shelf. Something about the extremely varied culture of the region really interests me in a way I can’t pin down.

In any case, while browsing the Goodreads Giveaways for this week, Lori Qian’s How Sweet the Bitter Soup leaped out at me as something I should keep on my to read radar. The cover is very appealing to my minimilistic preferences, and the short summary on Goodreads really hits all the right notes for me. From the short information available, it sounds like a memoir about an American taking care of her parents ends up transplanted in China through a teaching position. It sounds like the author learns a lot about herself through the journey, which I can appreciate.

Now if only my wallet kept up with my literary travels, I’d have a whole lot more to write about.

Refuse to Choose! Or, my justification for a messy shelf.

On By altlovesbooksIn book musings1 Comment
Here on the island of misfit projects…

After kvetching about not having anything to do this month, a friend asked, “What sort of creative project would you like to accomplish?” I lined up a whole postit note of things, ranging from learning how to knit to photography. Instead of being motivated for a creative project, I was tasked this week with reading Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose! by that same friend. I’m not sure how to take that.

I’m almost positive this is my first self help book I’ve ever read, and just the fact that I felt the need to explain myself shows how much I avoid the genre. It’s a vast sea of motivational posters, cash grabs, and don’t-do-stupid-things-with-your-money advice that just never had anything for me. Because I respect my friend’s advice, though, I’m giving it a shot.

I’m currently a third of the way through, and I find myself nodding along with a lot of what’s being presented to me. I’ve learned that I’m (supposedly) a “scanner”, or someone who dabbles in a lot of different things because our minds are (supposedly) wired differently. I start projects and don’t finish them. I have project ideas and don’t act on them. I enjoy my job because I never really know what I’m going to be doing on a daily basis. Creative solutions are my jam. “Boredom is excruciating” the author states, something me and this blog can attest to. I also am afraid of anything less than perfection, so the vast majority of my projects are never completed. Despite that, I’m also afraid of never completing a project and never leaving a mark that I ever existed. It’s a strange world in the mind of a (supposedly) “scanner”, and this book has been mildly uncomfortable to read.

There’s not a lot in the way of scientific fact in the book, and even the term “scanner” is coined by the author herself, so it’s hard to say how much of this is actually true. At the point of the book where I’m at there’s been a lot of self-affirmation and encouragement that being a “scanner” isn’t wrong, but not a lot in the way of steps to take from here. She suggests making a “Scanner Daybook”, which essentially is just a notebook of ideas and projects you’re supposed to write in daily, as well as writing prompts and such while you’re reading her book. I haven’t been keeping one because I’m not sure how badly I need it.

So I guess this is just a meandering way of saying that I’m cautiously enjoying this book, if only for the self affirmation and encouragement to keep half-starting projects and not actually completing anything. This blog wouldn’t exist if I wasn’t reading the book, I don’t think. How meta.