Tag Archives: bookstores

My Favorite Bookish Things

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On a Friday afternoon, as the weekend hoves into view over the horizon and one’s mind turns to good books, good food, and good company, it’s hard to keep those last couple of hours at the computer productive.

Or at least, focused.

Friday afternoons is when my fingers tend to wander–like my mind–down idle paths of Bibliophilia. Heck, sometimes I even play Solitaire, but usually I wander Internet sites dedicated to all things bookish.

So here, for your amusement and distraction, are a few of my favorites. There are thousands out there, and I’m always up for hearing about them, so please feel free to leave some sites in comments. Friday rolls around every week, after all (and Thank God!)

http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/ This is a site about little libraries built until phone booths, birdhouses, and other easy locations. It’s not unlike releasing books (bookcrossing.com) but it’s a whole tiny library. Their goal is to build more than 2,500 worldwide. More power to them!

I Love Buying Books, a page on Facebook. There are several I love books sites, but this one has unusual shelf pix, cool comments on all things bookish, and sweet pithy cartoons and drawings. Think “I can Has Cheezeburger” for the literary set. It’s a fun place to browse.

St. Martin’s Press, on Facebook. Hey, they’re my publisher, plus they’re not caving in to Amazon in that lawsuit, so of course I love them! Lots of publishing gossip on the side from comments people make, and a nice mainstream of pix, patter and potential.

Goodreads.com: troll through book reviews, catch up on the latest gossip, and if you’re really looking to kill some time but not brain cells, take the Neverending Book Quiz. The funny, snarky quiz questions are submitted daily by various Goodreads users who may or may not have axes to grind. E.g., Twilight’s Bella waits for men to rescue her and enjoys being abused by her boyfriend; therefore, she is a 21st century heroine: true or false. That kind of thing.

http://beautiful-libraries.com/ Many of these photos get pinned in Pinterest by friends, but I love to go to the site itself. Such calm deep quiet places….

So these are a few of my favorite things–from the book world, anyway. I haven’t even touched the many book blogs that are out there. And if you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to leave them!

Comfort Books

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I hope everyone had a safe and happy Fourth of July yesterday. Ours passed comfortably in a swelter of heat, a nice cold plate of veggies and cheese for supper, and gorgeous fireworks with friends on the lawn. (They taught my newly-American husband–a native of Scotland–to say “Oooooh” and “Aaaaaah” at the right times, and presented him with a stars-n-stripes baseball hat.)

We returned to find our neurotic younger dog Bert had chewed his way through the baby gate that keeps him from the bookshop floor, to huddle quivering under the table. Apparently, his firework reactions were less “Oooh! Aaaah” than “Nooooo! Aaaaaagh!”

In righting the destruction Bert had wrought, my mind turned to the rituals and readings we use to comfort ourselves in such situations; had Bert been able to pull his favorite children’s book off the shelf–Wind in the Willows, of course–and read it (as opposed to shred it) he might have been able to forget the noise outside and find his happy place.

I have a few “my troubles can’t get to me here” books to which I return when my heart is uneasy, my brain a hamster wheel of all-go, no-forward-motion. Let me just share five here, and then you tell me yours.

Psalms: as in Old Testament Bible. The letters in the New Testament are also pretty calming, and for those of us who believe the back story, they return the balance of seeing the Big Picture versus the immediate events of the day.

Except for Me and Thee, Jessamyn West. Such a happy story, even when it’s bittersweet. If you’ve not read this tale of a Quaker family and their daily-life silly adventures, it is funny and charming; you can feel your blood pressure dropping as you read.

Bert and I share affinity for Wind in the Willows. My two favorite parts are the visit from Pan when they find the lost otter child, and the return to Mole’s house for Christmas. This sweetness comes wrapped in warm brown fur.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Call me crazy. A friend who works in a prison says she once asked the shrinks there, who visit ax murderers and people who killed women and children, “What do you do to relax?” A lot of them watched that serial-murder TV show “Dexter,” because “as bad as it gets here, it’s not that bad.” I think The Road is like that for many of us. No matter what’s going on, it ain’t that bad.

Anything by Louise Rennison. If you’re unfamiliar with this British writer, she turns out faux diaries of a “typical” English girl’s madcap adventures in love and family. Lines like “7 pm: I shall never think of him again!” and “7:02 pm: I hate him. I shall call and tell him so” intersperse with bad hair days, deciding what to wear to those all-important dances, and other stuff that makes one laugh out loud. Rennison is hysterical.

So, I showed you mine. How about yours?