Holiday reading
A little Tolstoy on Thanksgiving never hurt anyone…
November 2010
14 posts
I caved in...
I got a new library card today. A whole new string of 14-digit numbers to memorize, Christ. But, for the sake of not standing in another line to borrow Tolstoy (self-checkout, baby) I am willing to make this sacrifice. Oh how times have changed!
Patience is not my virtue.
I wish I was as cool as Algernon.
Spent this morning reading Oscar Wilde’s hilarious play The Importance of Being Earnest.
Some quotes I couldn’t help but dog-ear along the way:
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Algernon: … May I dine with you tonight at Willis’s?
Jack: I suppose so, if you want to.
Algernon: Yes, but you must be serious about it. I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
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Algernon: If I am occasionally a little overdressed, I make up for it by being immensely overeducated.
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Jack: How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins, when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.
Algernon: Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
Jack: I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.
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Lady Bracknell: To speak quite frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marraige, which I think is never advisable.
“When someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colours, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him, they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He’s never sure what an eye reveals. But he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.”
—Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Word of the day 11.9.10
log·o·phile[law-guh-fahyl, log-uh-] –noun a lover of words.
(via writinginanachronism)
Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author →
laurenleto.wordpress.com
Pretty hilarious. Here’s a small sampling…
Ayn Rand - Workaholics seeking validation.
Jane Austen (or Bronte Sisters) - Girls who made out with other girls in college when they were going through a “phase”.
Haruki Murakami - People who like good music.
Charles Dickens - Ninth graders who think they’re going to be authors someday but end up in marketing.
Harper Lee - People who have read only one book in their life and it was To Kill A Mockingbird (and it was their assigned reading in the ninth grade).
Mitch Albom - People who didn’t go to college but do well on crossword puzzles.
Stieg Larsson - Girls who are too frightened to go skydiving.
Jonathan Safran Foer - 30somethings who were cool when they were 20something.
Mark Twain - Liars.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - People who drink scotch.
“I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
—Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”
Haiku
My local library is re-opening this Saturday after more than a year and a half of construction! In lieu of this spectacular news, I wrote a haiku dedicated to my childhood home away from home:
Oh dear library
Red bricks, I have missed you so
Be still, heart of mine
Here’s to you Parkside.
