I, too, have eaten paper from old books. I remember as a girl tearing and eating the corners of pages as I read. Victorian paper tastes dry—better actually, than the paper used in newer books, which, if uncoated, tastes dull like chalk, or, if glossy, like tilefish or squid. When I ate the paper I took each corner the way one takes a communion wafer, flat on the tongue, feeling it dissolve. I ate not from hunger but because the page came to hand. I ate my way especially through the corners of the books. My mother (who used to eat library paste and paper too!) said that both of us must have suffered from a dietary deficiency. Therefore I am free to blame my behavior on an inherited craving.
Dirty books have played a role in sex education for decades. I still remember the bonkbuster titles by Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran and the like passed around classrooms in the 1980s with key pages folded down. And I still remember my surprise, aged maybe 13, at just how far consenting adults could deviate from the sober positions outlined in Peter Mayle’s Where Did I Come From?. These lurid scenes didn’t erase my wistful hopes for a kiss one day from the boy of my dreams, but lived alongside them. As a teenager, I secretly read Nancy Friday’s 1973 fantasy anthology The Secret Garden, discovered at a local library and studied in sequential visits as I was too shy to take it home. Much of this anthology of women’s wildest fantasies disgusted me - it’s extreme stuff even today - but it taught me about the divide between the imagination and the act. I also read Puberty Blues, a great book about how lousy a teen’s sex life could be, and Judy Blume’s sensible story of the first time, Forever.
I love penguins. This made my day.

I love penguins. This made my day.

tphd:

Interesting to note that people don’t understand fiction as magic. A piece of fiction is a spell. I hear people expressing their understanding (or parroting other’s understanding) of fiction as “transportive” but you must all secretly know that it isn’t true. It’s not you who is transported. Fiction is an act of conjuration. Evocation. It’s an invitation, and perhaps something is transported but it isn’t you. It’s more accurate to say that something has been let in.
What have you let inside you?
What have you invited in?

A library is a bush of ghosts and you swallow them, you well read men and women, you swallow all the ghosts and they go inside you and stay there. You do not know it but you are haunted by the books you’ve read. You’re a mansion on a hill with a clouded night-time backdrop and there’s lightning and the black roots of a half-dead tree, something like a claw. Or a map. It’s funny how all roads lead to death and I wonder what happens, when you die, to all the ghosts. You at the River Styx, vomiting into the water and all the ghosts like fishes, like spectral guppies in the black. The cold, black water, barely disturbed, and now you’re empty by the shore.

It’s not so bad, really.

It’s just new.

And quiet.

(Source: lowendtheory)

Borders (via thegirlandherbooks)

Borders (via thegirlandherbooks)

beenthinking:

Brought to you by Uptown Theatre (Taken with instagram)

beenthinking:

Brought to you by Uptown Theatre (Taken with instagram)

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless.
curate:

“shield-book” [Sarah Amsler/ huffingtonpost]
Britain student protest - The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

curate:

“shield-book” [Sarah Amsler/ huffingtonpost]

Britain student protest - The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

nopnop:

book bookshelf chair gahakuna kuroneko library original overgrown ruins scenery table tree water window http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=14306787

nopnop:

book bookshelf chair gahakuna kuroneko library original overgrown ruins scenery table tree water window http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=14306787

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.
Only 40 percent of books that are read are paid for, and only 28 percent are purchased new, said Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry. The rest are shared, borrowed, given away — or stolen.