Visit to the Local Library helps, or does it?

Well now that our Local Library is so conveniently located, I am going there every chance I get. Is that good? Well it is excellent to satisfy my hunger to read and collect everything that I can get in my two arms to carry out so... I have a lot of books started and that makes my evenings very very busy!

Because of those great book bloggers out there that are opening my eyes to new authors, poets, new books of already well known authors and etc. I only have to input from home directly online to the Anchorage Library website for my "plat du jour" and here I am with many "dishes" waiting for me on the "holding" shelf at the Chugiak/ Eagle River Branch with my name inserted ready to be eaten, no reheating necessary. So convenient! I was first very annoyed by our branch being closed on Sundays and Mondays, I am now happy about it: For two days I don't have the option for a quick visit to see what is new.

Anyway my last "loot" included Carl Sandburg's selected poems. That was a real treasure. Did not know him before and I love his poetry. Here is a short one to give you "l'eau a la bouche":

I Sang

I sang to you and the moon

But only the moon remembers.

I sang

O reckless free-hearted

free throated rhythms,

Even the moon remembers them

And is kind to me.

I also got Ana Castillo's "Watercolor Women Opaque Men". I fell in love with the cover by artist Rufino Tamayo. I had seen it at the Phoenix Art Museum once. It is a memoir in verse and gives me a little view of what it is to be a Mexican picking seasonal fare in the USA. How it was to grow up from imigrants without money to speak of but how love substained them. I am just at the beginning and it really is easy to pick up and leave because of the short sections devoted to one subject at a time.
Another memoir but this time this woman is an famous editor (unknown to me until few days ago) Diana Athill: "Somewhere towards the end". Love the title and love the way she confines the very personal moments in her life in such a casual, honest way. I am enjoying that one too very much. Margaret from Bookplease introduced me to her.

Then "The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters was practically lifting its arms at me to be taken... It was short listed for The Booker Man Prize this year. That is going to be scary!!!

I am finishing "Nocturnes" by Kazuo Ishiguro. Short stories. Not my favorite not because of the author but because of the characters and the difficulties I had to look at the human behaviors in his stories. You wish never to know any of those people. They are so pathetic. No back bones and are as fickle as fickle can be even when they have talent they lack the self esteem and assurance that they need to succeed. Nevertheless I am reading it with interest and I am learning as I do. Can't help feeling pity and I don't like that feeling at all. I did a lot of head shaking. Maybe that is why I have had vertigo for two days now...ahahha.

I have started "Company of Liars" by Karen Maitland and I am time traveling to the dark Middle Ages it seems where a group of people are connecting, the Black Death is spreading in England. Different century same mistrust and same problems so far but also same hope of better days ahead. I do enjoy the rhythm of the language between those people. It is said to be a different version of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. I have never read that so cannot comment on it but I am planning on doing so in the future to see the difference. Should be interesting.

Then I am still working on The Children's Book. In between all this I have read some comic novels and parts of the new Muriel Barbery's "Gourmet Rhapsody" that one is in the car. In a nut shell it is the story of "the" gourmet critique in Paris that is about to die and cannot remember one flavor, so recollects his life in order to remember what is missing. So far that what it looks like. Each short chapter gives a memoir of this man mixed with other people's memoirs of him.

I am instantly in need of food after reading some pages of that book.

I will have to bring my camera with me next time I go to the library so I can post some pictures of this inviting little place. They do have the best little wooden chairs that I fit in perfectly. I am very short as you all know. I like that, about the chair that is. Well I don't mind being short either except when I don't have a chair that fits me. I do like my comfort.

Happy Reading