Alone

by Nikki Giovanni

i can be
alone by myself
i was
lonely alone
now i'm lonely
with you
something is wrong
there are flies
everywhere
i go

Judging Books by Their Covers: 2015

Okay, so we're already four months into 2016; I'm a tad late. But! This is such a great collection of covers, I just had to share. It's so hard to pick favorites to feature here, so you'll just have to click through to the Bookish website to see all of the beautifully designed book covers. Prepare to be awed.

Mutually Assured Destruction

When I was nine, my father sliced his knee
With a chainsaw. But he let himself bleed
And finished cutting down one more tree
Before his boss drove him to EMERGENCY.
Late that night, stoned on morphine and beer,
My father needed my help to steer
His pickup into the woods. “Watch for deer,”
My father said. “Those things just appear
Like magic.” It was an Indian summer
And we drove through warm rain and thunder,
Until we found that chainsaw, lying under
The fallen pine. Then I watched, with wonder,
As my father, shotgun-rich and impulse-poor,
Blasted that chainsaw dead. “What was that for?”
I asked. “Son,” my father said. “Here’s the score.
Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”

—Sherman Alexie

It's been so long since I've shared a haul with you all! These are the books I got on my latest thrifting session:

• The Art of Teaching, by Gilbert Highet
• Plain Truth, by Jodi Picoult
• Name the Baby, by Mark Cirino
• Prom, by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Forever, by Pete Hamill
• The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

And all six for just one dollar!

What are your latest book purchases? Snagged any great deals lately?

For Women Who Are 'Difficult' to Love

By Warsan Shire

You are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

From Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. Buy it here.

New Online Store!

I've set up a new online store. Please consider using it. Great prices on great books!

Click Here!

Quick Reads: 55 Great Books Under 200 Pages!

Crunched for time and looking for some quick reads? Or just want to check out some great-but-short books? The Half Price Books blog has a great list of books under 200 pages. It included a wide variety of genres, from Siddhartha to Charlotte's Web.

Check out the full list here.

Designing "Lolita"

The New Yorker has an interesting little article regarding book cover design for the Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita. Being a book lover and design major, I have no choice but to recommend it to you all.

Read it here.

My favorite of the covers featured:

(Cover by Jamie Keenan)

Book Carvings by Guy Laramee

View more:
The Great Wall series
Biblios series

Home Wrecker

And this is how we danced: with our mothers’
white dresses spilling from our feet, late August

turning our hands dark red. And this is how we loved:
a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in the attic, your fingers

sweeping though my hair—my hair a wildfire.
We covered our ears and your father’s tantrum turned

into heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above the fireplace.

Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god
to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car,

the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive,
put down the phone. Because the year is a distance

we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how
we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

This is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning
into a tongue.

—Ocean Vuong

url change

formerly: futuresfading
now: abookishnotion

Change is good.

click to enlarge

Ophelia, by British artist Sir John Everett Millais.

This oil-on-canvas painting depicts the character Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet singing whilst floating down the river before she drowns. This seen is described by Queen Gertrude in Act IV, Scene VII of the classic play:

Queen. There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them;
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious silver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

The Mermaid

A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.

W.B. Yeats

Unexpected Hiatus

So, I've been MIA on this blog for a bit. A lot has been happening and this blog was put on the back burner.

I plan on returning it to it's former glory, though. I'm goingo to post more regularly and get back to writing reviews.

I'm currently reading A Thousand Pardons, by Jonathan Dee. Looking forward to writing a review for you all!

Review| The Cranes Dance, by Meg Howry

Full Title: The Cranes Dance
Author: Meg Howrey
Genre: Fiction/Contemporary
Publisher: Vintage (Random House)
Publication Date: May 15, 2012
My Copy: Advance reader copy via Goodreads First Reads

The Cranes Dance, by Meg Howrey, follows the life of ballerina Kate Crane. She takes us through an especially rough patch in her family life that coincides with the career boost she may just need.

Kates sister, Gwen, is the superior dancer. Everyone knows this: Kate is a soloist, but Gwen is a principle dancer. But when Gwen’s neurosis get to be too much to handle, Kate calls up her dad to take her away. While Gwen is getting treatment, Kate injures herself but dances what has to be her best season yet. She snags lead roles, but her dependence on painkillers might be clouding her world.

Kate’s voice was instantly likeable for me. She is witty and funny. She addresses her audience directly, and is quite blunt and honest in her opinions. She is a very self aware and strong female lead. Her dancer lifestyle isn’t entirely relatable to me, but I felt I understood her regardless. Her emotions and thoughts are very well described.

Overall, this novel was interesting and engaging. I was never bored with it. I always wanted to read just a bit more before putting it down. Because of this, I finished it in one sitting. It’s a very quick read, but very good as well. I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone, dancer or not.

See (and like!) this review on: Amazon | Goodreads | Librarything | Shelfari

Life of Pi Footage!

Yann Martel's Life of Pi is being made into a movie, coming November 21, 2012. Here is a little sneak-peak footage. Looking forward to a full trailer. And, of course, the movie.

How to Kill a Living Thing

Neglect it
Criticize it to its face
Say how it kills the light
Traps all the rubbish
Bores you with its green

Continually
Harden your heart
Then
Cut it down close
To the root as possible

Forget it
For a week or a month
Return with an axe
Split it with one blow
Insert a stone

To keep the wound wide open.

—Eibhlín Nic Eochaidh

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl

By Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life.

— [Original article on Thought Catalog]

Review| 12:21, by Dustin Thomason

Full Title: 12.21
Author: Dustin Thomas
Genre: Fiction/Thriller
Publisher: The Dial Press (Random House)
Publication Date: August 2012 (expected)
My Copy: Advance reader copy via Goodreads First Reads

— Two weeks before December 21, 2012, a man speaking a strange language is brought into East L.A. Presbyterian Hospital with what appears to be a prion disease. Dr. Gabriel Stanton, a prion disease researcher for the CDC, is called in. When it is realised that the patient is speaking a Mayan language, Chel Manu, an expert in Mayan Studies, aides as a translator. She is rocked by what she learns from this patient, though. Chel has recently acquired an incredible artifact from a shady source: a previously undiscovered Mayan codex, dating back farther than any other. What could this man have to do with the artifact? How does his terrifying disease factor in?

If you haven’t already heard, December 21, 2012, marks the beginning of the end of the world. Well, at least to those who misinterpret the Mayan long count calendar, anyway. This 2012 doomsday phenomenon has completely taken over. It’s everywhere, and as December 21st approaches, I imagine things will reach a fever pitch. 12.21, then, is a very timely novel. But if you’re thinking this novel bends actual Mayan fact to fits its plot, think again. Instantly, Thomason shows that he has done his homework. A simple change of the calendar isn’t what’s bringing on the end in this one. In fact, the novel’s fictional terror feels entirely to possible. Prions are well explained, also. And so is the meatpacking industry. Made me glad to be a vegetarian (well... not counting that salmon I had for dinner... I’ll stop eating fish really soon, I swear!).

Stanton is your classic workaholic. He has an ex-wife to prove it. Chel is quite dedicated to her work as well. She is passionate about her Mayan heritage. Both are driven people and very easy to like. The two are really good together. Here is a relationship thats takes some time to grow. The trust is not instant. As they work toward a common goal, they learn to rely on one another’s expertise and judgement. The character development is great in this one.

Also instantly likeable is Paktul and his ancient codex. As Chel and her team translate his secret writings, the reader gets a glimpse into the world of the ancient Mayans. His telling of events is lively and engaging. I found myself looking forward to his story, wondering what happened to cause it all. You see, what Paktul describes holds both the clues to great past of the Mayans and the terrible fate that may await the modern world.

12.21 is filled with plot twists, and it’s interesting to see how things eventually connect and fall into place. The writing is writing is solid as well. This book is definitely a page turner. I’d recommend it to anyone, doomsdayer or otherwise.

See (and like!) this review on: Amazon* | Goodreads | Librarything | Shelfari

*Can't add a review until book is released. Link will be edited in.

Book Haul| June 18 - 24, 2012

Giveaway Wins
The Cranes Dance, by Meg Howrey
The Unfinished Garden, by Barbara Claypole White
Battleborn, by Claire Vaye Watkins
Buried on Avenue B, by Peter de Jonge
Long Time, No See, by Dermot Healy
In Your Face, by David Perrett

These all look so good!

—

Thrift & New Purchases:
Letting Go, by Philip Roth
Emma, by Jane Austen
A Breath of Fresh Air, By Erica James
Poison, by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

The top two are thrift. For the bottom two: apparently, a store near me gets discounted books. Both of these, though new, were just a dollar each. Thought I'd give them a shot.