"We gloriously forget ourselves..." E.B. Browning

this morning brings in its dawn a rekindled passion and voracity and motivating energy towards books, reading, and words.

perhaps it is my daily goodreads updates that bring me news of my loved one's reads. devon had a great post on Eat, Pray, Love that sparked memories of italian strolls.

perhaps it's kelly and brad coming home from camping, each having finished a book i love (Geek Love and Pride & Prejudice) and this sparked my memory of circus freaks and luscious decolletage.

perhaps it was my 40 hour entire reading of A Wrinkle In Time this past week that started the itch for more words and for fantastical stories.

perhaps it was the no TV night last night - where instead I sat on the bed at dusky 8pm, with sunbeams and moonlight tickling my skin as i devoured The Eye of the World (at 300 pages in, its getting very very good). It has given me an itch for fantasy. This itch went so far as to acquiesce to playing Heroes with Joel last night for two hours. It was rather fun - and quite addicting.

Perhaps it was this morning's stumblings into some beautiful poems by Elizabeth Barret Browning - who happens to be one of the most admirable women in the literary field. Or was.

Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father's name;

Piled high, packed large, --where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon,

I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first.

And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning's dark.

An hour before the sun would let me read!

My books!~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning ~

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book,
And calculating profits, -- so much help
By so much reading. it is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth -- '
Tis then we get the right good from a book." (1857) ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning ~

(bold emphasis mine)"

I love being lost in books, one of the few times where i can loose and find myself all at once...looking forward to my various camping trips where I mix alcohol, nature, charcoaled food, and endless hours of supine reading.

I bequeath this itch to you, my companions through words.

~xxooooooo
Mme. Bookling.

"There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

I am pondering some things about books lately.

...ponderings birthed from a re-definition of self that I have undergone in the last two years. I used to place such tight limitations on things i would allow to represent me- truly adhering to them as my own identity. I could only wear serious outfits, watch serious movies, say serious things, and definitely only read serious books.

All this stoicism made for a rather hard outer shell - and was rather intimating. Perhaps I meant for this to be so, but if I did - it remained rather subconcsious for quite some time. While growing up, people have always told me that I was intimidating (i am speaking mainly of women here, which JUST occurred to me, how interesting), and I just figured it was because I was pretty much a supermodel or something.

Turns out i am not a supermodel.

Well, that hardness has slowly been melting away and I find that more and more people are sheepishly confessing to me the books they read that i wouldn't have approved of in later years- you know, the guilty pleasure but feel embarrassed to tell anyone type of things - and i am picking up on their hints that they wouldn't have felt comfortable telling me these things a couple of years ago. I took myself (still really do in a lot of ways) so seriously - perhaps too seriously to even TRY to read Harry Potter. But in this debate, I felt like I was standing for something, making a statement about loving that which is well-written, not only that which is best-selling. (I realize that everyone says HP encompasses both worlds, but how do I turn my back on all the unread booklings of history to embrace this new impostor! I am working on a theory called Harry Potter and Titanic: A symposium of mainstream poo.)

I may/may not have to talk to my therapist about Harry Potter.

But in general, who am I to judge people who want to read best sellers all the time? maybe they had poor English teachers who just totally turned them off to serious literature, you never know. or maybe, just maybe - the best seller is good. (confession: the only best seller i have read is the kite runner and all of David Sedaris' books).

but like Flannery O'Connor's words, isn't there something to be said for a standard in writing? i do believe literature should be enjoyable, but i also fear that most people do not push themselves out of their reading boxes for fear, for intimidation that they will not understand.

one thing is for sure. everyone should be proud of themselves when they read, at least they are not watching tv.

welcome to my constant vacillation between tolerance and snobbery.

and keep reading those weird novels i have never heard of - you know, the ones written post1980 - and tell me if they are worth selling at bookling.

i will have to hire a best seller guru to instruct me.

not it.

"Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it"

I don't trust people who drop quotes in conversations.

Unless you are a professor or a writer, there is no need, my friends. If you are talking to me, I already think you are smart.

Saturday night, on the walk into downtonw, joelio and I ran into this girl from college who just threw out this Descartes quote in the middle of the conversation, and ever since then, I have had an irritable itch under my skin about the encounter. I realize this is completely critical and unfair (and probably more to do with my being intimated at her knowledge), but in general, I really distrust people who must use the words of others to express themselves in conversation. It speaks to me of the ultimate bravado of intelligentsia.

It's like people spouting out bible verses. EWWWW.

Confession: I am HORRIBLE at small talk. I despise it, I cannot manage to make myself care about the mundane facts of the lives of people with whom I am not actually intimate. So when I run into someone I knew in a past life (exception: this girl was joel's friend, not mine - we never actually spoke), I almost never know what to say. This is why I am also bad at church.

Example: I speak to my sister but once every few months, and even then - when you need a couple of "what did you do today?", or "what's your dog been chewing of yours?" questions, I jump right to the jugular of important conversation - like last night. We were speaking about father's day and after 10 minutes of precursory conversation, I used a phrase that may/may not have referenced my inner child dieing the day dad left. I laughed at how quickly into the conversation I said this - without any real warm up, but that's candace for you. This trait needs no explaination to my sister, she knows me quite well. We do not dance around with people.

Despite the tone of moral superiority enclosed, I realize that small talk is a skill, an art that I really MUST perfect if I am to be a small business owner. But there is also something to be said for wanting to extract the bull shit and either spend the time getting to know a person or just not talking to them and letting them go on their merry way.

Both are probably necessary.

But hence my problem with this girl I haven't seen in over 8 years throwing out a Descartes quote about knowledge...like she didn't seem present enough in herself to just use her own words. It felt like an affront.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE ME SOME QUOTES. But make no mistake, I will never use them in a casual conversation with you. And if you insist on using them, I will scoff and sniker.

satirically yours,
mme. bookling.

p.s. the above quote may or may not be from descartes.

it's gettin gooood!

Just in case you were wondering, reading (or blogging about reading, or blogging about a bookstore, or talking to adam about the business plan for the bookstore) can't really happen when one is marrying off a close member of the family.

Somewhere in between the penis toss game, the “Bachelorette” cocktail, the shopping for safety pins & tide sticks, eating only appetizers, going through fourty outfits for various events, and driving all the way to Egypt and back – there wasn’t a lot of time for my book, booklings, or the business plan.

I WAS able to SQUEEZE in the first essay in Sedaris' new book When You Are Engulfed in Flames while riding myself of the dancing sweat caked on my skin in the bath, but mainly I just stared at my wet feet in exhaustion while trying to comb out the hairspray mess atop my head.

I did manage to smell a couple books here and there (namely, my great uncle aubrey's old bible, oh what a scent of bliss), so I didn't completely abuse them.

But during last night’s bath, my eyes missed my dear bookling.

It may also have had something to do with joelio’s most profound statement of yester eve. “I feel like getting lost in a book.”

And so it began. I picked up The Eye of the World. And wouldn't you know it? 72 pages into the book and it get exciting! I ended up taking a 30 min bath just to read (and the water was getting rather frigid!), but now I just want to leave my cubicle and sneak upstairs to the lounge - where i would eat, sleep, and read the day away.

wanna join me? (but you can't talk!)

happy reading, loves. as always.
mme. bookling.

book envy

When did reading in public become so damn popular?

Every single time I see this, (and it happens a lot here in Seattle, the nation’s highest “use of public libraries” city), I feel the following:

• Deep prides in this city
• Quickening impulses to teleport myself into their mind so I too can be involved in some heroine’s journey through her dysfunctional family
• Uncontrollable urges to rip the bookling from the reader and sniff its strange and magical pages (envision Mary Katherine Gallagher)
• Voyeuristic obsessions to find out which book is so damn engrossing, and then immediately judge a person by what they choose to read in public (i am a snobby elitist)
• Deep-seeded book envy which creates an inner dialogue reading something like this, “I want to be reading! I want to read standing at the bus stop, I want to read on the bus ride, I want to read while I drive, run, eat, sleep, and breath.!” (envision Veruca Salt)
  
  

And I want to read while I drink. This desire is what birthed BOOKLING.

I saw this girl at my bus stop today – in the rain, barely covered by an awning, enthralled in her 75% finished book. I felt my heart pang. My breath quickened, my stomach turned in knots and I felt the green monster emerging. “Damn it, I totally forgot my book.”

Then again, while on the bus, I saw this guy in great shoes pouring over his own pages. Damn it… the whole fracking city is reading.*

Except me.

I must recommit myself.

Dear Booklings Mine,
I am dreadfully remiss in my attendance to your ever-present needs. You require not much effort – only time. How my eyes long to skim your alphas and drink in your font. I fear that when I get my life back, I will again find you waiting for me in your patient and accepting manner, pages humbled with years.

It’s a lifelong love-affair, dear patrons.
"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me." — C.S. Lewis
~Mme. Bookling.

*In BOTH cases, see my uncouth (and unsuccessful) bodily contortions to discover what manner of booklings were these, but it didn’t really look promising – you know, just some NY Times Best Seller bull shiet. Freaking Clive Cussler. “"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. " — Flannery O'Connor

"we read to know we are not alone"

why do i feel so inspired to read when i can't possibly read, and never inspired to read when it's available to me?

yes, yes, i am still struggling with finding reading time since the commute was stolen from me. (i am very bitter. nope.)

last night i thought "this is it!"

let me set the scene:

10pm. the house blanketed in peace. joel fast asleep...new lamps on either side of our couch. all other lights off - all sights and sounds feel very library-esque. my book beckons (remember i am still really trying to get into this book i promised joel i would read (see left) ), only my computer is right on the way to my book. i can't go to bed because i have clothes drying in the communal laundry room. i have to stay up...so yeah, the computer is the most logical choice.

i am not a tv watcher, really. i mean, i don't just sit and peruse through tv, we don't even have it. but i can watch certain series IF i have them. since i don't have any i am watching, i am not even tempted by the tv. instead, my bane is the computer. it sucks my time like no one else, i will shop, chat, read, research, shop, chat, and shop.

all this shopping steals my reading.

and now, as i sit at my quiet cubicle at this souless mortgage banking company, i realize that i want for nothing other than a comfortable chair, a big cinnamon roll and coffee, and my book. even if it is Robert Jordan.

and i have to finish it because i think i decided that my next bookling is A Wrinkle In Time. Yes, i have never read it! (and i just realized that i don't own it! gasp.)

in other bookling news, today David Sedaris' new book, When you are engulfed in flames is released. Third Place Books in Seattle is hosting a reading by Sedaris, and you get two free tickets (tickets required) when you purchase a copy of the book. i have done this! yay, i love book readings and i happen to really laugh with Sedaris.

if i can't read today, i wish it for you, sweet sweet soul.
happy reading,
~Mme. Bookling.

"i wonder that you will still be talking, signior benedict: nobody marks you."

After a rather rousing good time at the Sex in the City movie this weekend, Mme. Bookling and five of her dear friends sat around her apartment, lips dripping with wine, brownies, and happy wordlings.

One question was posed to the group…the answers of which relates to literature, so the Madame must share.

“Name one movie plot, hero/heroine, or book that you most relate to as a woman.”

EKKKKEEE. I freaked out for a second when I realized that literature was also included – this is just much too vast a question. When Niki realized my distress, she excluded literature and I relaxed.

My answer was still literature BUT it was also a fabulous cinematic movement, so HAH.

Answers - only given after the many qualifications women are known for…

“I know this is really cliché, but…”
(on a side note…DUDE, I say fuck cliché. I am so tired of it being a discredit to something we can/can’t wear, do/don’t do, say/don’t say, drink/don’t drink, feel/don’t feel. Cliché only takes into account the masses of women that we imagine are judging us – cliché is only cliché if we let it be, so embrace your likes/dislikes - they are what makes you YOU).

Now to the answers:

Jo from Little Women
Juno
Joel and Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Allie from The Notebook
Amelie
Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing

Pretty great answers. How about you? Movie hero/heroine you most relate to.

Too bad the weekend is over, dear readerlings!
~Mme. Bookling