The Joy of Reading...on My Kindle

As I began to buy more ebooks, I felt a sense of surprise and delight and wonder that I could carry around a library in my pocket. It is a library, arranged alphabetically or, if I like, in order of buying, and nothing shelved in the wrong place. The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back. Wherever I am, there is always something to read.

~Linda Grant, I Murdered My Library

Joy of Reading...

Two quotes from a recently finished, hug-it-when-last-page-is-turned book...

A seasonal observation...
It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face.

Babies...
It's a good thing babies don't give you a lot of time to think. You fall in love with them and when you realize how much they love you back, life is very simple.

The Joy of Reading...

Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as well as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born. What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?

~Mary Oliver, Dog Songs

Joy of Reading ~ Sweet Judy Blue Eyes

...from Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music by Judy Collins

Upon hearing for the first time "Both Sides Now" (written by Joni Mitchell)--

A classic song has much mystery as well as mastery in its form; it sits still in the mind, throwing light on the past and the future, often bringing tears to our eyes, for it reaches into deep emotional wells that are often forgotten in the rush of the moment.  The songs that touch me are on a very high level in terms of form and classic structure, and "Both Sides Now" has all of the requirements to make it irresistible.  For me, it was an immediate love affair.

Joy of Reading ~ Rin Tin Tin

...from Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean

The Adventures of Tin-Tin-Tin was broadcast for the first time on October 15, 1954.  The debue episode, “Meet Rin-Tin-Tin,” was the story of how the “Fighting Blue Devils” of the 101^st Cavalry came to be stewards of Rusty and Rinty—or, as Sergeant O’Hara puts it, “How we found them two little orphans.”  …The show was an instant success by every measure.  It had one of the fastest ratings climbs in television history and from its start was ABC’s second-highest rated show overall, trailing only the Walt Disney show.  Nine million of the 30 million televisions in the United States tuned to The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin, several million more than were tuned to Lassie, which had premiered on CBS a month earlier.  It was also a critical success.  “Crammed with action, gun-play, and chase scenes of pre-musical-cowpoke Westerns,” wrote a critic in TV Guide.  “It makes fine viewing for kids and nostalgic viewing for grown-ups.”  Even The New Yorker paid its respects, running a “Talk of the Town” interview with the “proud, tall, long, four-year-old, hundred-pound, gray-and-white great-grandson of the original Rin Tin Tin.”  At the end of the piece, which was mostly an interview with Eva Duncan, the writer, Philip Hamburger, noted that after dinner at the Stork Club, where he turned up his nose at the roast beef, Rin Tin Tin “drank milk out of a champagne glass” and “pushed a molting goose called Susie down Broadway in a baby carriage.”  …The show was broadcasting in seventy other countries besides the United States, including Canada, France, Lebanon, Kenya, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Cuba, Thailand, Germany, Bermuda, Brazil, Italy, New Zealand, Surinam, and Japan.  Just as in earlier decades, Rin Tin Tin was everywhere.  He was a single point connecting people all over the world, from all different cultures and circumstances, all of them watching as the camera angled up to the crest of a hill where a big dog stood at alert, a depthless silhouette against a western sky in a placeless place somewhere in the timeless history of America.

Joy of Reading ~ Lake of Dreams

...from Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards

For me, that’s the power of stories—that you can’t quantify them.  That they keep opening up and revealing something new.

Joy of Reading ~ Wesley the Owl

...from Wesley the Owl by Stacey O'Brien

Grandpa still played and taught drums and continued with his life.  After an appropriate time had elapsed, the predictable “casserole brigade” started appearing at his doorstep.  Unfailingly polite, he thanked each lady for her kind attention, but told her there was only one woman for him and that was Grandma.  He had lived his lifelong love.  This was the Way of the Owl.

This passage reminded me of my father whose nickname growing up in the 1920s was "Owl."  He and my mother were married for 49 years. After she passed away, there appeared a steady stream of various pies and cakes on the deck of his Cape Cod home, all left there by a neighboring widow.  One day while he was walking, his neighbor came out to say hello.  My father thanked her for all the goodies she had been leaving for him.  She then asked him, "John, do you like to dance?"  He replied, "Why, yes, I do.  And I like to do the asking!"  Ah...the Way of the Owl.

Joy of Reading ~ Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

...from Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik

She opened the cover and ran her hand over the page, enjoying the paper’s smooth, cool texture under her hand.  Chapter One.  How many times in her life had those two words invited her to go to a different place, a better place than the one she lived in?

Joy of Reading

...from Joy for Beginners

Marion’s fascination with tattoos had always come from the stories that were held within the ink—the ones that were obvious, slamming into your vision with the force of a well-aimed fist, or the secret messages that hid, slipping out only for the moment it took for a shirtsleeve to move, a skirt to flutter.

Joy of Reading ~ The Lantern

...from The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson

I have always been a reader.  As a child, I loved books, though there weren't many at home.  But as soon as I went to school and was given one to look at the lovely pictures, and turned the pages to find more of the same, I was happy.  Such colors and strange and vivid images!  I marveled at how they were all closed up, asleep with their secrets unseen until you reached up and took the book down from the shelf.

Joy of Reading ~ Maine

...from Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan

She opened the newspaper, which Arlo had set out for her.  She flipped past the front-page news and the Arts section, landing finally on the Sunday circular.  She didn't clip coupons, but the women in her family had always been so obsessed with them that she could never shake the habit of looking them over, just in case there was something amazing to be found, though of course there never was.  One ad offered free floss with the purchase of five tubes of toothpaste.  As if floss had ever broken the bank for anyone.  Human beings were strange about free stuff.  Her mother was the queen of it--I got four bottles of ketchup for the price of one, Alice had bragged over the phone a few weeks earlier.  Who needed four bottles of ketchup?

Joy of Reading ~ Burnt Mountain

...from Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons

I pattered down the steps and into high June on the river, buzzing with faraway insects and trilling with birdsong and smelling of wild honeysuckle from the river woods and cultivated blossoms from our garden, and fresh-mown green grass.  I twirled around three times on my bare feet and toppled over into the cool, damp grass, head back, face tipped up to the sun, eyes closed under its gentle fist.  It seemed to me at that moment that every atom in my body stretched itself up toward the sun, that my blood sang with the air and the running river, and that I would forever be as happy as I was at that moment.

Joy of Reading ~ Joy for Beginners

...from Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

At first Caroline had seen the job of used-book buyer as a stepping-stone to the more exciting world of the new releases displayed at the front of the store, their words freshly printed, their meanings clean as new sheets.  But she quickly realized she had an affinity for the older books and their muted scents of past dinners and foreign countries, the tea and chocolate stains coloring the phrases.  You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.  As Caroline had riffled through the pages looking for defects, she had discovered an entrance ticket to Giverny, a receipt for thirteen bottles of champagne, a to-do list that included, along with groceries and dry cleaning, the simple reminder:  "buy a gun."  Bits of life tucked like stowaways in between the chapters.  Sometimes she couldn't decide which story she was most drawn to.

Joy of Reading ~ Clara and Mr. Tiffany

from Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland

It was our books that remained. I was careful to pick out my own, leaving his. Into my carpetbag first went my mother's Shakespeare, the plays and the sonnets. I couldn't help but think of the first line of Sonnet Twenty-nine, which seemed to be aimed at me this last month as it never had before.  "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes."  In went my mother's etiquette book, The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen, which I read with some levity, and my stepfather's Bible and his Minister's Bible Concordance, which bristled when I put Whitman's Leaves of Grass next to it. My leather-bound Keats and Wordsworth came next, reminding me that it wasn't a bad thing to brighten one's days with snips of poetry, like my mother did. Then Ibsen's plays, Vasari's Lives of the Artists, and Henry James's Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. There stood Emily Dickinson. The 1890 collection, her first, Francis had given me. The 1891 collection I had given him. I took them both, wondering what follows The Sweeping up the Heart / And putting Love away.

Joy of Reading ~ Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

from Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch

People share books they love.  They want to spread to friends and family the goodness that they felt when reading the book or the ideas they found in the pages.  In sharing a loved book, a reader is trying to share the same excitement, pleasure, chills, and thrills of reading that they themselves experienced.  Why else share?  Sharing a love of books and of one particular book is a good thing.  But it is also a tricky maneuver....  The giver of the book is not exactly ripping open her soul for a free look, but when she hands over the book with the comment that it is one of her favorites, such an admission is very close to the baring of the soul.  We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspects of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.

Joy of Reading ~ Folly Beach

from Folly Beach by Dorothea Benton Frank

When I was a little girl I spent hours wandering along the edges of this very shore, my sneakers sinking in the soft sand, my footprints filling quickly with the rising tide.  It was hypnotic, watching tides roll in to wash the shore with their swirl and froth.  The water chased the flocks of tiny sandpipers away, back into the salty air and they landed some twenty feet down the shoreline.  Then the water pulled back only to slide in again, over and over, in its own measured time, covering the beach inch by inch, until it reached its high-water mark.

Joy of Reading ~ A Fatal Grace

From A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

The store felt like an old library in a country house.  The walls were lined with warm wooden shelves, and they in turn were lined with books.  Hooked rugs were scattered here and there and a Vermont Castings woodstove sat in the middle of the store with a sofa facing it and a rocking chair on either side.  Gamache, who loved bookstores, thought this was just the most attractive one he'd ever met.

Joy of Reading ~ The Seasons Hereafter

from The Seasons Hereafter by Elisabeth Ogilvie

Whenever she came near the table, she touched the books with nervous, sinewy hands. Suddenly she seized one and opened it and became instantly hypnotized by the print. She stood entranced until she was freed by the noise of the kettle boiling. Hurriedly, she took a thick heel of bread from the box, spread it with jam, and poured hot water over the coffee in the mug. She dragged a chair across the aged linoleum and settled herself, the books about her plate and mug like ramparts. There was the long ineffable moment of delicious indecision, fingers hovering over one binding and then another. She finally opened one book and propped it against the others, and as definitely as if a sound proof door had swung shut behind her and locked, she had left the world.

Joy of Reading ~ The Arrivals

from The Arrivals by Meg Mitchell Moore

"Why are you taking it so personally?"

She thought about that. Then she took a deep breath and touched her hair. She didn't look directly at William when she answered, because she thought that if she did she might begin to cry.

"Because they're my life's work."

He remained silent, watching her, listening.

"If they're not happy--if they're not capable of living on their own, and being happy--it means I've failed. I should take it personally."

"Oh, Ginny," He reached across the table and laid his hand on her cheek. She pressed it in closer.

"This is it," she said. "I'm sixty-three years old. This is what I've done with my life. They're my masterpiece, and they're broken."