Are there such things as fairies? Of course, duh. That’s not up for debate. What is in question is your knowledge of fairy tales! Not those stupid saccharine Disney versions either…the real world of literary fairy tales, full of darkness and depravity and gore.
Give it a try, if you dare! Answers will appear tomorrow.
Few expressions of literature reflect our humanity more than poetry. It has a way of succintly and directly, through metaphor and symbolism, rhyme and meter, that exposes our most innermost selves. It speaks to the individual and it speaks to society. April is National Poetry Month and the 30 days of April barely seem long enough to explore all that poetry is.
If you haven’t explored poetry, thinking it too stuffy or perhaps too vague, take some time to rethink that stand. Poetry has a way of speaking to our hears and souls the way few forms of literature can. Although music has that ability, generally the written word is not so concise and prodding.
The page I have linked to below, for National Poetry Month, has a vast collection of poetry links that will satisfy any reader. They are organized in different fashion: There are poems about each season, there are collections by author, and there are collections by topic. Just stroll around a little. Give it a hour and release yourself from the noise of the technological age - the pace of a life that is going too fast for the nuturing of the human soul. 
You will find yourself and those you love in these words. Somewhere, somehow, there is a poet who has found what you feel most deeply within and put it into words. Once touched by those words, you will never be the same.
The two books I have selected are excellent and very affordable. The Best Loved Poems, is only $1.50. The book below will help you understand poetry - once you know how to read poems, you will never stop!
About three months ago, I found a wonderful book club online. Well, maybe book club isn’t the best description. It is like a giant wish list that… well, that’s not really it either. Let me try again. This book club had resources to help me find books that I might be interested in… but that wasn’t all. The name of this site is Book Browse and it is a great Web site for readers who need a little organization and love to hear about new books.
Let’s face it. When you go to your “Local Bookstore,” whether that be in the mall or online, it is hard to find new things to read. It isn’t that they aren’t there. There are tons of new books all of the time. But in our rushed lives, hitting the bookstore at lunch can be less than fulfilling. This site fills in and helps readers find the treasures we might otherwise overlook.
You can search by genre, by theme, country of setting, or even time period. Each book has information from the jacket, excerpts, reader reviews, author interviews and biographies. Many also have reading guides for those wishing to use a certain book in a monthly reading club. There are also quotes from reading critics, which you can read or disregard totally.
Each book also has a link to a site that compares the prices of the book you are interested in, or you can go directly to Amazon and buy from there.
Book Browse has ways to organize book lists, prioritize reading, organize purchasing of books, and if that didn’t provide enough, each book on your personal book list has a box to make comments. It also has a section to mark to remind you why you want the book - a gift, a must read, a want to read, have read, or if you have rejected it as a possibility.
Book Browse is a great site for the casual reader or the serious reader. There is a free membership as well as a premium membership. The customer service is fantastic, the owner of the site is friendly and I think you will be pleased with your membership.
No, I do not understand string theory. And furthermore, I do not wish to understand the complex mathematics that go into the study of it. But I still found The Elegant Universe,” fascinating, and with the author’s ability to explain physics, and then make it matter to Joe Average, I would have to say string theory is really pretty interesting stuff. I 
think it will be safe to assume that Dr. Brian Greene’s new book, The Fabric of the Cosmos,” will be just as interesting.
Backtracking a little bit, I have to state that I believe nonfiction is part of our reality of literature. Literature, strictly defined is, “The body of written works of a language, period, or culture.” At least Dictionary.com says it is. I agree. Literature is the written word that reflects a generation. This generation is all about information overload. New discoveries are happening faster than people can possibly document them. Therefore, it is a part of our culture, and a book written about one of these new discoveries, is therefore literature.
We are defined by what we read. (Scary thought, isn’t it?)
At any rate, I found The Elegant Universe, fascinating because I didn’t like the idea of poor Einstein being shoved aside as though his work and brilliance didn’t matter any 
more. The Fabric of the Cosmos, promises even more with theories about time and 11 possible dimensions, or alternate universes. Which means that there may be 10 other me’s, writing 10 other blogs, all with different situations, motivations, and conclusions.
A universe of infinite possibilities. Now if that doesn’t grab you for reading, nothing will!
Sparked by the trademark wit, humor, and brilliant use of analogy that have made The Elegant Universe a modern classic, Brian Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.
Random House
I know a lot of people who love to read, also have some visual challenges. And audio books aren’t cheap - not by a long shot. There are some options online but some of them are pretty pricey as well. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a library of audio books for a reasonable price each month?
I found the perfect solution. It was a moment of pure serendipity. Picture someone stumbling into a doorway and falling flat on their face in the entry hall. That is, in a cyber-kind-of way what happened to me. The Web site is called JiggerBug. It is to audio books, what Netflix is to films.
There are three plans. One allows you to have one audio book at a time. A second plan allows for two at a time, plus a downloadable audio book every 14 days, and another plan allows for five audio books at a time, plus two free instant downloads every 14 days. These are very reasonably priced plans - you can keep the CDs or tapes as long as you need to and it is all postage paid. And there is a two week trial - what more could you need?
Just like Netflix, they have a queue. So I have selected about a dozen books and they will come to me one after the other, as I return them. I chose the two at a time plan; my plan is to be reading one while the other is in transit.
They have classics, plays, genre fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction… you name it and they have it. And if they don’t, they’ll try to get it for you via a convenient request form.
I am thrilled. I love to knit, which is why I am usually hanging out at Hankering For Yarn, my primary blog. And there are times I want to read but I can’t do both! Movies I can at least listen to, but I have a HUGE stack of books to read. Now I can knit and read simultaneously. I have been doing the happy dance ever since I found JiggerBug.
Hidden in the collections of Philadelphia libraries is an unexpected treasure — a rich trove of more than 7,000 medieval and Renaissance miniature paintings showing religious scenes, classical tales, historical events, and medieval romances. Many have never been on public display, or even studied by scholars. (From Leaves of Gold)
This is a collaborative project of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collection Libraries. That is quite a mouthful! And it is also quite a collection. I was sure, to be honest, what an illuminated collection was. Now I wish I lived in Philadelphia so I could see this in person. Fortunately, it is also online - not as good as being there, but it is the next best thing.
From Leaves of Gold, “Illuminated manuscripts are hand-produced books that include drawn, painted, and gilded decoration on pages made of vellum, a specially prepared and polished animal skin. The simplest manuscripts are adorned with calligraphic penwork dividing one paragraph of text from another. More lavish examples are embellished with historiated initials, enlarged and colorful letters that contain tiny representations of figures or biblical scenes.”
This collection is breathtaking. Go take the tour and then take some time in the learning center. It is amazing.
The Nebula Awards are the most coveted (arguably) award with authors of speculative fiction - that is to say, science fiction and fantasy. This year’s winners are Lois McMaster Bujold, Eileen Gunn, Ellen Klages, and Walter Jon Williams, and Anne McCaffrey. The award is given by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The Hugo is the only other award that is dedicated to science fiction, and the winners are selected by the fans of the books.
First, I want to give a big welcome to my wonderful friend Adelle Tilton, who is now writing here at Literally Blogging! You’ll love Adelle…trust me, you just can’t help it! Hooray for Adelle!
And now, on to our topic. I was listening to Bang Go the Bells in the car the other day, a song so glorious it’s nearly impossible to believe that Babylon A.D. never produced another noteworthy song. In my opinion, anyhow. Of course, I am the Rock Goddess, so my opinion is right.
It’s not an original story; the road to fame is littered with the broken bodies and scratched albums of One Hit Wonders. No matter how many times it happens, it still seems staggering: how can a person or group with enough talent to light the sky on fire and enough charisma to dampen the panties of young girls all over the world possibly dry up and blow away so easily?
Maybe the music is that much more powerful, and poignant, because we know that song is the Only One.
Truly heartbreaking is when the One Hit Wonders happen in the world of literature. It’s bad enough when your favorite author doesn’t write books fast enough for your taste, or you’re sick of waiting for the next Harry Potter installment, but what about when someone writes a book that goes straight to your heart…and then they never write again?
The writer I always think of here is Harper Lee, author of the heart-breakingly beautiful To Kill A Mockingbird. To write a book that so touched the world, that instantly became part of the tapestry of our culture and history and human nature…and then never write again…is almost incomprehensible.
There are the cynics who claim it’s because Lee never wrote the book, that her friend Truman Capote did, and that’s why there was no second attempt. But this is bull; anyone who reads Capote would see how different the styles are, and anyone who knows anything about Capote would know his ego would never had let Lee get the credit for such a success.
Was there one moment of magic, when Harper Lee was able to pull back the curtain that separates this world from the world of divine thought, when the characters and the steamy South suddenly sparked alive in her, heating her fingers, brain, and heart as she typed frantically to get the story onto paper?
Was that one story she told, those marvelous characters she created, so wonderful and significant that nothing else would really matter after that? Did she quit because she thought anything else would be futile, that she could never top her first creation? Was she all out of words and inspiration, or was she meant to change the world with just one book? Is one book enough to fulfill a life’s purpose?
I think it must be…actually changing the thoughts of people and the ways of the world with one beautifully written, starkly honest work of literature has to mean more than shooting out a hundred books.
So, thank you Harper Lee. You’ll always rock on.
Bang go the novels.
I just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking. I was attracted to the book because of the topic of grief and bereavement, but I don’t see it as a book that is only suited for those who have lost a husband or faced a potentially fatal illness in a child. It is a beautiful work of nonfiction - the creative expression of what Ms. Didion experienced during her first year of widowhood is called “taut,” by Publisher’s Weekly, “lacerating yet peculiarly stirring,” by The Washington Post, and “a stunning book of electric honesty and passion,” by Random House. It is that and much more.
The Year of Magical Thinking, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005, starts immediately with what Ms. Didion must now view as the turning point in her life: Her husband’s, author John Gregory Dunne, heart attack and subsequent death. In her recording of the events of that evening, the reader can’t help but feel the unreal and almost surreal emotions that memories of this nature imprint on our minds.
It was clear during the course of the book that Didion, like most people who lose a loved one (particularly if they are present at the death), was trying to come to terms with what had happened. I felt her attempts at putting the event of heart attack, the paramedics and then being told her husband was dead, into some sort of reality that could make sense, and at first she was unsuccessful. She just could not wrap her brain around the fact that her husband and the man she had worked with for 40 years, was suddenly absent.
To complicate matters in Didion’s life, her daughter became seriously ill, and while the newly widowed woman was trying to trying to cope with moving from wife to widow, she was also trying to save her daughter’s life. Perhaps her grip on reality, as tenuous as it seemed at times, was maintained by the involvement in her daughter’s medical care - it was a touch of reality in an otherwise unreal world.
I was particularly struck by Didion’s realization of “pathological bereavement,” which is something that has just recently been recognized by the medical community. Grief can knock our normal everyday thinking, a few notches to the left, and we are never the same. Didion, like millions of others, did learn to live with the grief but her continual wish that he would return, illustrating by refusing to dispose of her husband’s shoes (he would need them when he came back), so honestly faces the unresolved issues that death brings into our lives.
The remainder of the book deals with the struggle Didion endured as she coped with the loss of her life partner and the fight for her only child’s survival.** The book was written approximately 18 months after John Dunne’s death, and her ability to step outside of the unreality to observe herself and the reaction of our society to grief, is amazing.
As usual, Didion uncanny ability to capture the nature of the human mind and emotions, is paramount in this book. Her investigative abilities show clearly; she seems to ask herself questions that a person can barely even imagine thinking, let alone writing, in such a public forum.
The book has garned some criticism because of the economic bracket that Didion and Dunne lived in, but I did not find that to be a factor in my feelings about the book. Death brings us all to the same level. Whether one lives in a penthouse or a small apartment, the experience of loss is the same. Death is the great equalizer, and has no respect of financial status.
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
**Although the book ends with the impression that Didion’s daughter did survive, as she was improving dramatically, she did pass away in 2005.
New York Times Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking
I found a really creative site today. It’s a lot of fun and it provides a lot of information. The name of the site is Gnooks, which I am assuming is pronounced, “nooks.” It is a rather unique way of researching literature and authors. It also has a forum and a nifty little shopping tool.
But the best part of Gnooks, in my opinion, is the Literature Map. This isn’t a traditional map. When I found the site, and entered in an author’s name (I chose Willa Cather) I expected to find a dot on a map. Literally (no pun intended). But it didn’t work that way at all.
Literature Map provided what could best be described as a word cloud of author’s names. The theory behind the map is that if I liked the author who I entered, I would also like these authors. I tested it a bit.
By entering John Steinbeck, I found that I would probably also enjoy F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Henry Miller, Franz Kafka, and many others. Each name was a link that also produced another word cloud and more authors were presented.
I think this is an ingenious way to discover authors. Some of the names I wasn’t familiar with, therefore it served the purpose of expanding the potential reading I could do. Here is the progression I followed:
Granted by choosing names of known favorites, I did hedge my bets a little, but should I have explored into names I wasn’t familiar with, I would have found some new material for my reading list. But it doesn’t end there; this site is now going to help me find books by the author I have decided to pursue.
So I returned to the front page of Gnook and typed in “Amy Tan” in the literature locator, and was taken to a page that listed many places to buy her books. It really did cut out a lot of searching and with the prices posted, I could tell exactly where the good deals could be found.
They also have a forum for discussion of authors and a tool that helps you find authors based on a selection of your three favorite books. This tool worked well too, but I liked the literature map better.
Take a look at Gnook. I think you will have a great time there. Bookmark it for those days when you are wanting to start a new book and discover a new author. This site makes it fun to find new books to explore and widen your world, just a little bit more.
Gnooks is a part of a greater whole, Gnod, created by Marek Gibney. Gnod also covers movies and music in the same manner as they cover books.