These are difficult and challenging times we find ourselves in so to provide some entertainment for us bookish folk Judith at Reader in the Wilderness has started a new Friday meme. (I know it's Saturday :-) I was rather busy yesterday.) She's calling it 'Bookshelf Travelling For Insane Times' and here are a few details:
This meme involves books that are currently in your house or apartment or the abode where you reside. The books do not have to belong to you necessarily.
1. For each Friday post in the coming weeks while we endure the impossible, select a book shelf, or maybe two shelves, or a bookcase, or maybe a pile of books standing high upon the floor of your bedroom or living room. Or select any other random selection of books. Please don't be hemmed in by spatial constraints or parameters. Do it your way by all means!
2. From that shelf or bookshelves, choose a number of books that you would like to share with us whether you have read them or not. Some of them you may have read long ago and would like to revisit in memory or revisit the experience and time and place of reading the book. If you wish you could share a bit about what you liked or disliked or whatever else you would like to say.
Or select books you hope to read in the future and tell us about a few of them, as many as you like. And do this however you like. Jumble it up however you like.
3. If you'd like and if you're able to, share a photo of either the books, the shelf, the shelves, or whatever you'd like, but this is just a suggestion.
4. Feel free to ruminate and ramble in your discussions, because this is strictly for FUN, and I hope to have a lot of fun when I participate. Do delve into the shelves of your significant others, if that sounds like fun.
5. If you can't do it on a Friday, please feel free to participate on Saturday, Sunday, or Thursday.
A few concepts you can use:
1. Home.
2. Books in the home.
3. Touring books in the home.
4. Books organized or not organized on shelves, in bookcases, in stacks, or heaped in a helter-skelter fashion on any surface, including the floor, the top of the piano, etc.
5. Talking about books and reading experiences from the past, present, or future.
Please visit Judith's blog here and here for more ideas and info.
And here is her first post.
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In other words this is a very flexible meme that we can all have fun with.
So, inspired by Judith who mentioned a book of letters she has by Arthur Conan Doyle and because I've not long finished a book of them by Patrick Leigh Fermor, I thought I'd photograph my own tbr pile of books of letters.
From the bottom:
Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill edited by Mary Soames. I've been interested in the life of Winston Churchill for several years now and have read several books already. This one is 'huge' because they wrote to each other every day, so this is probably a good time to read it given I'll be spending more time than usual at home.
Over the Rim of the World: Selected Letters of Freya Stark, edited by Caroline Moorehead. Freya Stark was one of the most famous travellers and travel writers of the 20th. century. She knew and was friends with Patrick Leigh Fermor, in fact he's written the forward to this so I can't wait to read it.
Canada A Portrait in Letters 1800 - 2000 by Charlotte Gray. This is a portrait of a nation through a collection of letters as it says on the cover. Letters from many, many people included in this, suspect it's going to be fascinating.
Africa in my Blood: An Autobiography in Letters by Jane Goodall and edited by Dale Peterson. These are letters from the early years of naturalist, Jane Goodall, who lived on a wildlife preserve by the shores of Lake Tanganyika and studied chimpanzees.
Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson edited by Ernest Mehew. This is taken from eight volumes of his letters apparently. Wow. That's a lot of letters but then he must've been an interesting man, he certainly wrote some of the most iconic books in the English language.
The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh edited by Charlotte Mosley. Two more authors who knew and wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor. I think this might be the next volume of letters I read given my interest in the Mitford girls. And I wonder if it will lead me to read something fictional by either of them?
So, those are the books of letters I have on my tbr pile at the moment. I have a Goodreads shelf devoted to book of letters here as well so I think it can be said that I like to read volumes of letters by famous and not-so-famous people. It's become a bit of a lost art and I'm not one to point the finger as I used to have dozens of penpals all over the world and wrote endless letters myself during the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
So I hope others will now have a go at this lovely new meme. It's very flexible and unstressful and lots of fun. Go on... you know you want to.
7 comments:
I love epistolary books and memoirs. And what a fun idea to travel your own bookshelves. :)
Thank you, Cath, so much for the mention and for trying to spread the word about this meme to others who may be holed up at home with loads of books and who are secretly longing to share them with others.
A number of your volumes of letters left me awe-struck, Cath! Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, for example. Who knew? Perhaps I should have, but I had no clue that they left a correspondence. How fascinating.
The Clementine-Winston letters interest me, too, after reading the historical novel Lady Clementine. And such a huge volume (I checked)!
And Africa in My Blood--letters by Jane Goodall--whoa. I had no idea she had an "autobiography in letters." I own her definitive biography, which, Cath, I have never read, can you believe it? It's sitting neat as a new penny on one of the bookshelves in my favorite and grandly tall bookcase in my bedroom. I'm so interested--have lots to record in my "WannaReads" file tonight. Thanks!!
I don't think I have ever read a book of letters (non-fictional). I should try one some time. I have one on the Kindle that I bought last year and forgot about: "Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald". So thanks for reminding me about that.
I am working on my post for the meme right now. Slowly as my mind is scattered.
Thank you for the heads-up on this meme, Cath. I think that books are going to keep a lot of us sane as this thing gets a whole lot worse before it begins to level off and get better. Anything that brings us all together on a regular basis to discuss books (and anything else that's going on in our corners of the world) is a blessing. It's the little things like this that will make this a whole lot easier to take than would otherwise be the case.
I love epistolary books, both fiction and nonfiction because of all the little details that the letters inadvertently reveal about the correspondents. It works great for character development in fiction, but the same thing can happen in memoirs and histories. I have a collection of original letters written by two brothers in the 1860s during the American Civil War and I still get goosebumps when I read the ones during which they go back and forth on whether or not voting for Abraham Lincoln is a good idea.
Lark: Yes, I seem to like epistolary fiction and non-fiction too... far more than I realised! How odd is that?
Yes, it was a grand idea of Judith's to start a meme where people can explore their own bookshelves... something all of us bloggers have plenty of scope for. LOL
Judith: It's my pleasure, it's such a clever but simple idea.
Yes, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, not a couple of letter writers you would immediately think of. But it seems that back in the 1930s, 40s, 50s etc. everyone knew everyone else of a certain class and corresponding was a way of life. There is a rich vein to be mined it seems to me.
LOL... oh yes I can well believe you have a biography of Jane Goodall and haven't read it, my own bookshelves are *full* of such unread books too.
Tracy: I find books of letters surprisingly easy and undemanding to read. I suppose they make a change from murder and mayhem! And they're always interesting and revealing about the authors.
I've just seen on my Blogger Reading List that you've done a post for this meme so will go and read it in a moment.
Sam: My pleasure. Oh yes, you're spot on about books keeping us sane while this crisis lasts. And connected to that is the book-blogging community which we can use to keep in touch, I think we will sorely need it.
Like you, I think epistolary books work a treat. May I ask what the title of your American Civil War book is? I'll add it to my Goodreads shelf.
Cath, I have the actual letters, not a Civil War book using them. I used to collect a lot of Civil War relics, and I found the letters in a Boston antique store sometime in the late seventies or early eighties. They are still in really good condition except that the ink has turned brown now. Other than that they look as if they could have been written yesterday. I'm struggling to keep my old newspapers from wasting away on me, though, including one that announced the capture of Lincoln's assassin on its back page (I suspect that "breaking news' was hard to slip in at the last moment.
Sam: Ah right, understood. Wow, imagine discovering a collection of letters like that in an antique store. You must've been thrilled!
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