Basilicata bibliomotocarro
Antonio La Cava, a retired school teacher, converted a quintessential Italian vehicle, the three-wheeler micro-van, into a travelling library.For 20 years he’s been visiting remote villages and hamlets in his home province of Basilicata to bring books –...
Reading as travel
The Rat is a street-savvy kid in a barely known children’s book by the author of the infinitely famous The Secret Garden. I enjoyed the book and The Rat is one of the most endearing characters. He teams up with the noble-born lost prince to go and reclaim a...
Intimate and familiar
A striking idea, that in being true, a book will feel intimate and familiar to all men. ‘True’ surely means authentic rather than fact-based. Some books feel intimate and familiar to some people, not all, and there is value in that too. It is probably...
Key Penmanship Indicators (KPIs) VI
This is a description by Anthony Burgess of the reader’s reaction to Mervyn Peake’s writing in the intricately imaginative Gormenghast trilogy.My reaction to Peake’s Titus Groan, the first of the trilogy, is that the effect of his writing is in...
Hopelessly insane: Homer fans
Here Christopher Logue highlights the sheer vital durability of Homer and the magnitude of such sustainability, kept alive through a hard core of ‘Unprofessional Ancient Greek Readers’. I don’t know if I qualify, since the UAGR could refer only to...
The Saturday of Libraries
When we moved to the town of Nyon, I joined the municipal library. The building itself is worth writing about – great thick walls, windows widened with painted wooden shutters, flowers on the sills and in stone pots; a child’s dream of a library, though in...
Feeding & reading: nuts vs apples
Thoreau’s observation on the pitfalls of eating nuts. However, the upside, as far as I gather, is that nuts are packed with brain-food. ‘It is quite too absorbing; you can’t read at the same time, as when you are eating an apple.’ Source:...
Two years and counting!
WritingRedux was launched in 2016 on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth which happens to be Saint Jordi’s Day in Spain, something like Valentine’s day, celebrated with gifts of books and roses. That makes us two years old today, so a chance to...
Beach books
We recently enjoyed a month’s holiday – the longest we’ve ever had – to celebrate Luiz’s retirement. One of the happiest elements in packing for a trip is messing about choosing which books to take. Here’s the pile I took and read...
Letters opening up like doors
What a wonderful description of words and letters opening up to let meaning emerge in brightness and fire. How much prose has such compelling clarity of meaning? Let’s add this to our writing KPIs (key performance ink-dicators). This is from a splendid novel by...
From tapers to tinder
I loved this description of a young boy going to all lengths to be able to read as much as he wants. I remember being conscious of a few specific books as a small child, and ‘reading’ them long before I knew how to read. Some were children’s books...
On the Elizabethans and book learning
I have no idea if this is a fair appraisal of the Elizabethan stance on book learning, but I have an impression of a robust, exuberant, poetic spirit, capable of savouring sweetness even when regularly confronted with brutality. My impression itself may be overly...
