How dreary - to be - Somebody!

What`s better for this purpose than doing a meme?
( My Interests Collage! )

This was just too perfect.



And this actualy makes sense. (From my profile: "Prelud" is a wonderful (rarely used,though) Slovak word with many meanings: spectre, ghost, hallucination, illusion, mirage, vision...)




This, too:




And perhaps this:

Gacked from sigune.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. * - Read more than once. Underlined - On my to-read list.


Compiling or editing lists was always oddly soothing during stressful times for me. And this meme is about books, so it`s just perfect.
I need to re-read many of the books I marked as read, as I already forgot almost everything about the content... Especially the books I read in my late teens, when I had time and energy to devour a book a day. I wish I had so much time now.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22 - esp. Chapter 8
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion* - yes, read and enjoyed several times. I`m a serious Tolkien fan.
Life of Pi : a novel
The name of the rose* - one of my faves. I LOVE Brother William.
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and prejudice
Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The brothers Karamazov - I think the problem was in translation. It emphasized the "Russian soul" factor too much.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and peace
Vanity fair
The time traveler's wife
The Iliad - as a kid, I was a Greek mythology fan.
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The kite runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great expectations
American gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault's pendulum*
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & demons - You`d have to pay me a lot of money to make me read this.
The inferno
The satanic verses
Sense and sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune*
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela's ashes : a memoir
The god of small things
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves:
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud atlas
The confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger abbey
The catcher in the rye*
On the road
The hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's rainbow
The Hobbit*
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The three musketeers*

Looking at this list, I regret we spent so much time in high school on our national literature (which is okay, but teeeeeny tiny). I have serious gaps in my reading of world literature, esp. in English. And I don`t know where to begin. Do you have any ideas which British/American classic marked above as unread should I read first?

What do white cats and white laundry have in common?

They`re difficult to wash.

Micka`s last bath was months ago and more than white she now looked gray-yellow-white.
Before bath:

What a haughty animal.
You cannot see that here, but the back of her head and neck (where she cannot wash herself) was gray-yellow and her paws and the whole back end were dirty too. She`s an inside/outside cat, so she gets dirty.

( Pictures of humiliation )

FEBRUARY

Jan Skacel


So this is February, black and hard,
with snow that is no longer white,
with water splintered in the shallow courses
as the frosts bite.

We`re thin and drawn and desperate for spring.
Sunken our eyes like the the lean flanks of does.
In our dreams we fear that when spring comes
we`ll stand apart, with no one left to know us.

I`ll use Valentine`s day as an excuse to post some lovely music.

Bon jour, mon coeur by Orlando di Lasso (sung by The King's Singers)

This delightful little chanson is one of most beautiful love songs I know. The lyrics come from a poem by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585).

( lyrics )

♥ ♥ ♥ to my flist!

Every year (for at least ten years) at the beginning of autumn I start hearing a poem in my head. It`s R.M. Rilke`s Autumn Day. When I walk outside under pale autumn sun, see the ripening apples in our garden or walk across a park, I hear echoes of Autumn Day in my head and the poem`s slow rhythm compels me to start to recite to myself…


Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.
Lay your shadow on the sundials now,
and through the meadow let the winds throng.

Ask the last fruits to ripen on the vine;
give them further two more summer days
to bring about perfection and to raise
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will establish none,
whoever lives alone now will live on long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters,
wander up and down the barren paths
the parks expose when the leaves are blown.



I know this poem by heart both in German original and Slovak translation, and I looked up English translations on internet for the purposes this entry. I like the one above most of all. Maybe some of the others have more better choice of words in some verses (I`m not good enough in English to judge that anyway), but this version translates best the rhythm of the original poem, which is slow at first and gradually increases the pace.


Herbsttag

Herr, es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.



This is one of my favorite Rilke`s poems and IMO, it shows why R.M.Rilke`s works belong to the short list of possible reasons why a person that doesn`t live in German-speaking country or doesn`t need German for his/her work would ever want to learn German. (Another example is poetry of Christian Morgenstern.) Here, this incorrigibly ugly language is by some miracle turned beautiful. Suddenly, German words turn into music. It takes a true genius to do it.

This year Autumn Day came to me soon, at last days of August. The evenings were already beginning to feel quite cold, and I was reminded of mad heat most of Europe experienced in July. I was sorry to see that summer was already leaving – although I do not like heat and in the hot days of July I wished to hide in a cold basement of some medieval building.

But now I`m wrapped in a soft fleece blanket and I`am craving summer again. Well, that`s the irrational human nature... Now I have only few things which can chase away the melancholy of autumn. Memories of summer. For example, this one:


Emily Dickinson
214

I taste a liquor never brewed -
From Tankards scooped in Pearl -
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air - am I -
And Debauchee of Dew -
Reeling - through endless summer days -
From inns of Molten Blue -

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of Foxglove`s door -
When Butterfies - renounce their "drams" -
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats -
And Saints - to windows run -
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the - Sun -

( Photo behind the cut )