I have a review coming up that will have a link to an older review - because one of my favorite obscure and weird Victorian writers has popped up unexpectedly - and in trying to tidy up that old review I can't tell if I'm having quote problems because it's an imported review from GR and there's messy code, or whether something has changed with the quotes within reviews. Which is a really convoluted way of saying, hey I'm going to post something to test blockqutoes.

I'll just grab some bookish articles I've read in the past week or so. All from the Guardian, because I end up clicking a lot of their bookish links.

 

Quiz: Can You Identify These Classic Books by Their Covers?

Guardian, 22 May, 2014

Because I'm a sucker for online quizzes. (I just know never to give any of them my email address.) This particular one relies on whether you've seen a very particular cover or not - because all of the books listed have had many variations of cover design. I totally guessed on several of them. (There is a show answers link on the page with your score.)

 

Marriage Plots: The Best Wedding Dresses in Literature

Guardian, 20 May, 2014

"...In the 19th century a new dress might be obtained for the wedding, but it is not necessarily white, and it will be used again – and plenty of women just wore their best dress, perhaps with a veil. The tradition for white seems to have started with the weddings of Queen Victoria and then her daughters, but took a long time to catch on. The one-off wedding dress is a 20th-century invention, and even then, as we discover in the work of Nancy Mitford and Somerset Maugham, a new bride was expected to wear her wedding dress to her first dinner parties."

 

And aside from parties you were also to wear that wedding dress when you were buried - but I think that was a much older tradition.

Linda Grant: I Have Killed All My Books

Guardian, 16 May, 2014

"...In the middle of my move I watched a documentary called The Flat. A family was clearing out the Tel Aviv apartment of a 97-year-old woman who had recently died. She had lived there for 70 years, since arriving from Germany in the 30s. The walls of the flat were lined with books published in her native language. Her grandson called in an antiquarian book dealer. He took the volumes off the shelf and hurled them with force to the floor. "No one reads Balzac," he said. "No one reads Shakespeare. Nobody wants Goethe. Know how many books they throw away in Germany?"

 

...It is more than 50 years since I began to build my library from its earliest foundations in the elementary sentence construction of Enid Blyton. Now, at least half of the thousands of books I have bought are gone. It is one of the worst things I have ever done. I hate myself. But not as much as I have come to hate the books. Hate books! A thought-crime at the very least. Only a philistine, a religious zealot, a Nazi would hate books.

 

It is not the words I hate, not literature, but their physical manifestation as old, musty, dusty, yellowing, cracked objects, heavy to lug around. When I open the pages swarms of black ants dance on the paper. No one told me. No one said: "In the future you will squint and screw up your face and try to decipher these words you once read so easily." When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Alice in Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her."

I just recently went through my own "I'm moving" book cull, and though I wouldn't have phrased it the way she does, I went through a lot of the same feelings. First not wanting to get rid of any of them, then (honesty time!) realizing some were never going to be read again, then realizing how very many I had (reality of shelf space time!). It helps to know that her longish article is an excerpt from a Kindle single, so you're not getting her entire thought progression on the subject. But I'm not sure how many would want to buy that (the kindle single, not the thought progression) since it seems like just a long blog-like, talking to yourself, reminiscing about books. You get the feeling she's working out her feelings through the writing.

And if you were still wondering - the quote issue is purely in the one post via import - no problems in creating this post. As I suspected. (Sigh.) Time to clean up whatever old code is messing things up. (I think it comes down to the use of line break code which are sometimes used instead of paragraph breaks in GR for some reason - or at least in my old posts.)

On the whole,  this was an interesting book made up largely of contemporary accounts --- mainly from civilians on the British home front --- which appeared in The Spectator (a British weekly magazine) during the Second World War.