Hello dear readers

I’m going for a month-long summer vacation! Unfortunately, this means I will not be updating the blog for the whole month of July. I shall be resuming normal posting once every two days in August. Please feel free to search through the archives, I’m sure there are many posts you have yet to read as I’ve only moved this blog to WordPress.com in July 2007 (I started it in September 2006). Lots of pictures of bookish gadgets and news and book reviews!

Enjoy browsing around The Literary Pursuit, and hope you are having a good summer.

nylusmilk

ps. Or, if you’re lazy (it is summertime!), here are quick links to some of my most interesting posts, in my opinion.

Images
Biblioteca Erotica
Children Books That Never Made It
Weirdest Book Titles
Rights of the Reader!
If You Constantly Max Out Your Credit Card on Books, You Need This
BookShelves That Attract More Than Your Books
Book Art: 2-D & 3-D
Romance Novels Reimagined
Bookcases Have Never Look This Gorgeous Before, Seriously
Some Bookish Eye Candy
Bookish Things: To Have & To Hold
To Be Or Not To Be: A Writer, That Is
Make Your Ceiling & Staircase Your Bookshelves
Bookshelf Smut
Kooky Book(y)shelves

Poetry
Beauty really defined
A Celebration of Indolence
An Author’s Haunting
Flings with the Foreign
National Poetry Month
A Rembrandt Painting & The Old Woman
Girl Power Poetry, Woot!
Laugh at These Lewd Limericks

Resources
E-mail Literature
Virtual Bookshelves
Literary Comic Strip
The Bible Reenacted in Lego
Stars & Their Bookish Ways
Online Games For Bookworms
The Bible Not Spared From Lolcats
The Lord of the Rings, á la Bridget Jones’s prose
Free E-books Directory

Reading
Very Short Stories… Literally
The Non-existential Dictionary
Militia Hysteria
English Lesson from Wikipedia
An Author Who’s Proud of Having His Novels Stolen From Libraries
Classics Cannot Be Compulsory
What J. K. Rowling Couldn’t Do
If Ever There’s A Reading Idol To Emulate, It’s Edna Fould
How Books Are Priced
My Humble Bookshelf
A Wonderful Bookish Read

43 links for you to click - that’s 1 a day, and another one for the weekends, and a few extras if you’re super bored!

Related post

One gets lots of funny stuff in the e-mail, like this poem about the inconsistencies and peculiarities of the English language. (Those who are familiar with the development of English from the Old English period to today’s Late Modern English period will understand why it’s such a mish-mash; the author is presumably not!)

ONLY THE ENGLISH COULD HAVE INVENTED THIS LANGUAGE

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
Then shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

Let’s face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in England.
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing,
grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And, in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother’s not Mop?

I WOULD LIKE TO ADD THAT IF PEOPLE FROM POLAND ARE CALLED POLES THEN PEOPLE FROM HOLLAND SHOULD BE HOLES AND THE GERMANS, GERMS….

Unknown

Philippa Gregory is the author of several bestselling novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl, The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, and The Boleyn Inheritance. A writer and broadcaster for radio and television, she lives in England. She welcomes visitors and messages at her website, www.philippagregory.com.

The book in one sentence: The historical fiction of Queen Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of King Henry VIII.

Who would you recommend it to: Readers interested in the English monarchy, or someone interested in historical romance.

OK bits: I like the romance between Catalina (her Spanish name - Katherine was the English version) and Arthur, the Prince of Wales she was betrothed to before he died unexpectedly.

Boring bits: I didn’t like the beginning, and how Katherine actually think it’s God’s bidding for her to be queen, that she rationalises her schemes and tricks to become Queen of England. However, the story explains well why she has such an outlook in life.

Random review quote:

“Another terrific novel by Philippa Gregory, The Constant Princess portrays the lies, deceit, and behind-the-scenes manipulations at the Tudor court and may just answer the burning question about Katherine’s first marriage and how her own monumental lie changed the course of history in England” -Romance Reviews Today, Romrevtoday.com

Verdict: It was pretty boring at first, but I was hooked into it after a while. I learnt more about the English monarchy in this book than I did in my English Civilization class. (But that’s just a small bit, having just focused on Katherine’s story, as well as being fictionalised. That said, I’d definitely be looking out for the author’s other books on the Tudor royalty.)

Inspired by this post, I’m going to post my NTBR list.

1. War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy
This book will probably not give me the peace I usually feel when reading, but instead would probably make me want to wage war with it.

2. Any Shakespeare books
I’ve read 2 for literature classes - Macbeth and Hamlet (of all of Shakespeare’s classics, my class was assigned the two most morbid ones). The plot is interesting, but Shakespearean language does not appeal to me. I wouldn’t mind reading abridged versions or watching movies though.

3. Douglas Adams’s books
I’ve read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I’m scarred for life.

I’m sure there are plenty of books I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole, but I won’t say just in case I change my mind in the future. Presently, though, I do not read any political or self-help books. Or health books.

What books do you not plan to read and why?

Hay festival: Authors rebel against age ranges on books
Richard Lea and Nell Boase
Friday May 30, 2008

The controversy over plans to put recommended age ranges on the covers of children’s books ignited at the Hay festival yesterda, with authors speaking both for and against proposals due to be implemented by a wide group of children’s publishers later this year.

Marcus Sedgwick, who won last year’s Booktrust teenage prize with a sinister vampire tale, My Swordhand is Singing, described the initiative as a “disaster”, while Carnegie medal-winner David Almond called it “silly”. Francesca Simon, author of the bestselling Horrid Henry series, said the proposals were “ridiculous”, while the Carnegie medal-winner Mal Peet, called them a “very bad idea”.

Article continues
“If you’ve got reluctant young readers,” he explained, “they’re going to be reluctant to read any book which they consider to be beneath their age range. And there’s no point in encouraging able young readers to read above their age range because they’re going to do that anyway.”

According to Peet the complicated question of whether the books are suitable for children of a certain age in terms of language or in terms of subject matter is “not being addressed at all.”

“Sooner or later this age ranging is going to degenerate into a moral code,” he said, “which would be terrible.”

The initiative comes after research commissioned by the Children’s Book Group of the Publishers’ Association in autumn 2006 suggested that 86% of consumers were in favour of age guidance, an interpretation which has been challenged by others within the industry.

Rebecca McNally, publishing director of Macmillan’s children’s division, was keen to stress that the idea was to provide “loose guidelines”, and that Macmillan authors had reacted favourably.

“We’ve written to our authors and had a positive response,” she said.

According to McNally the aim is to increase consumer confidence and sales.

“Anyone who’s ever seen adults trying to choose books for children thinks this is a positive thing,” she said. “The whole point is to help adults who often feel completely lost in the children’s section of a bookshop.”

But according to Simon a darker motivation is at work.

“It’s about getting rid of bookshops,” she suggested. “It’s about selling books through supermarkets or over the internet, without the kind of specialist guidance you can get from a bookseller.”

The proposals are part of wider pressures reducing books to “educational tools,” she continued. “The only thing that matters is can they read it, not should they read it, or would they enjoy it.”

It’s a suggestion rejected entirely by McNally, who claimed that children’s choices would not be straitjacketed by the age badges.

According to the research children were influenced by “what the cover looks like, and an exciting title,” she said. “They didn’t seem to pick up on the age-ranging and certainly didn’t seem to feel negatively about it.”

The Guardian children’s fiction prize-winner Meg Rosoff also declared herself “all in favour” of the proposals.

“I think it helps people,” she said. “Most people have no clue about book-buying. Some people aren’t even comfortable going into bookshops because they feel it’s not for them. The clearer you can make it, the better.”

It’s a problem she admitted to struggling with herself before she became a children’s author four years ago.

“I had to buy books for kids and I never read books for kids, and I never read reviews for kids,” she said. “How the hell did I know what to buy?”

With the Carnegie-shortlisted author Philip Reeve also in favour of the initiative, the controversy looks set to continue, something that will give heart to the scheme’s opponents.

“If there were negative feedback,” said McNally, “we’d reconsider.”

What do you think, should there be age ranges on books? I don’t. I think if you put an age range on a book, it will either turn off young kids from reading them (it’s too childish) or spur them on to want to read them (it’s adult - there might be some sex scenes!). While I understand that people who are buying books for children would appreciate the age range indicator, I don’t see why a good bookshop assistant would not be able to help in that, or there’s always online shopping, which is even better since it comes with reviews and lots of other suggestions. Otherwise… book vouchers?

For someone like me who’s one of the biggest bookworm I know (hah!), I’m puzzled by bookplates. What are they? Bookplates sound like some metallic plate you paste on your book, but I don’t think it’s metallic, is it? So a quick search through Wikipedia explained to me that bookplates are just book labels on which you write your name. Oh, why don’t you say so? You see this stuff all the time in books, except they’re preprinted and not exactly customised as original bookplates are.

Through this post, I found a blog all about bookplates, as well as a site of a bookplate designer. I also found some bookplates created by Quentin Blake (the illustrator who illustrates in Roald Dahl’s children books). Very cute for your children’s books.

Now, I have no idea what’s a screen print, but this one looks pretty nice all the same.

I like Rossetti’s poetry. She writes about death and love in a bittersweet manner.

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day.
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand.
I will be late to counsel them or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while.
And afterwards remember; do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thought that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Here’s the first Rossetti poem I’ve read, studying for my Literature class.

Song

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree,
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain.
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Related Post

Kim Edwards is the author of the short story collection The Secrets of a Fire King, which was an alternate for the 1998 PEN/ Hemingway Award, and she has won both the Whiting Award and the Nelson Algren Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

The book in one sentence: How a father’s secret decision to give his Down’s Syndrome daughter away affects the lives of his family for years to come.

Who would you recommend it to: If you like bestsellers fiction, you should enjoy this one.

OK bits: The premise of the story. I like the idea of exploring how secrets can affect not just the keeper, but also the people it is kept from.

Boring bits: The literary bits, where it goes on and on about the character’s emotion and likening it to something symbolic or stuff. I don’t enjoy bits like this, though I can see the prose is beautiful.

Random review quote:

“A tale of regret and redemption… so lovely you have to reread… just to be captivated all over again” - Jodi Picoult

Verdict: Personally not to my taste, but it was a good book nonetheless.

Needed an idea for a post, so I decided to take a page off CJWriter’s book, or rather, blog.

I don’t see books as life-changing. To me, life-changing is something that has the power to turn my life around through it, like a tragedy in my family or an unexpected turn of events. What I do see books as are things which mould me into being the person I am, the way I see life, think of issues, et cetera. Not entirely, of course, but books taught me lots of things teachers and family didn’t, and I’m definitely smarter, or rather more aware, because of the books I read. So I’m going to list some books which had great impact on me as a reader and a person.

1. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
I constantly name this book as one of my favourites. The author is a girl, who wrote a book for boys at only the age of 17. How amazing is that? This book taught me about boys, how the bond of friendship can be greater than family, and about social discrimination. Each time I read this book again, I never fail to cry.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
This is the only classic I enjoy and understand very much. I learnt about integrity and racism through the eyes of a child. I just recently watched the movie and it’s excellent.

3. Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
This is my favourite Dahl children’s books, even more than the popular Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I love to read about the idyllic father-son relationship in this book. They were poor but happy. I love how they get into trouble by poaching, and try to cover it up with the help of friends and neighbours. It’s a very dreamy and wonderful children’s book.

4. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Oh, this is a really sad science fiction book. It’s about a retarded man, after going through a scientific experiment, becomes a genius. The book is written as the man’s journal - so when you first read it, the spelling and grammar is as atrocious as that of a slow-witted person, and gradually as his intelligence improved, so did his grammar and choice of words. The experiment in time proves to be a failure, and the poor man’s intelligence quickly deteriorated to a bad ending. It brings to me that classic question: would you rather never to have loved at all or to have loved and lost? Though in this case it’s intelligence rather than love.

5. The Music of Dolphins by Karen Hesse
I love this children’s book about a girl who was raised by dolphins before she was discovered. After she was brought back to civilization, she was placed in a laboratory to be taught, along with another child who was raised by animals in the jungle. Her childlike perspective on life from what the dolphins taught her makes you question a lot of things about life. She ends up going back to live with the dolphins.

(I haven’t read my favourite books in a while, so my description of them probably doesn’t do much justice. I do recommend you read it if you ever stumble across them.)

My list of books do not change my life, so to speak, but they largely feed on my ideals or created my ideals. Most of the books I chosen are not great classics of our time, but in a way, it also reflects me as a person. I’m not a popular girl; I’m quiet and have few friends in my circle. But in in my small circle, I like to believe I had a presence in the lives of the people I know, however small it may be.

Just for posterity; I’m sure I have read none of them in the list! Have you?

1. The I Ching
2. The Old Testament
3. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
4. The Upanishads
5. The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu
6. The Avesta
7. Analects, Confucius
8. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
9. Works, Hippocrates
10. Works, Aristotle
11. History, Herodotus
12. The Republic, Plato
13. Elements, Euclid
14. The Dhammapada
15. Aeneid, Virgil
16. On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius
17. Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria
18. The New Testament
19. Lives, Plutarch
20. Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus
21. The Gospel of Truth
22. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
23. Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus
24. Enneads, Plotinus
25. Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
26. The Koran
27. Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
28. The Kabbalah
29. Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas
30. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
31. In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
32. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
33. On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther
34. Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
35. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
36. On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus
37. Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
38. Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes
39. The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler
40. Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
41. The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare
42. Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei
43. Discourse on Method, René Descartes
44. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
45. Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
46. Pensées, Blaise Pascal
47. Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza
48. Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
49. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton
50. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
51. The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley
52. The New Science, Giambattista Vico
53. A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
54. The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.
55. A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson
56. Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire
57. Common Sense, Thomas Paine
58. An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
59. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
60. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
61. Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
62. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke
63. Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
64. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin
65. An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus
66. Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
67. The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
68. Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte
69. On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz
70. Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
71. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
72. “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau
73. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin
74. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
75. First Principles, Herbert Spencer
76. “Experiments with Plant Hybrids,” Gregor Mendel
77. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
78. Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell
79. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
80. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
81. Pragmatism, William James
82. Relativity, Albert Einstein
83. The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto
84. Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung
85. I and Thou, Martin Buber
86. The Trial, Franz Kafka
87. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
88. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
89. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
90. The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek
91. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
92. Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener
93. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
94. Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
95. Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
96. Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
97. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn
98. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
99. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong
100. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner