by beatriceotto | Jun 8, 2018 | places & spaces, readers & reading
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...
by beatriceotto | Apr 22, 2018 | readers & reading
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...
by beatriceotto | Jan 19, 2018 | readers & reading
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...
by beatriceotto | Dec 21, 2017 | print & publish, put in a good word
This lovely word is Icelandic for ‘Christmas book flood’. As you may know, Iceland is home to the world’s most committed readers and it has long been a tradition to give books at Christmas. This leads to a flood of new publications in the...
by beatriceotto | Nov 7, 2017 | readers & reading
Alan Bennett was born in Leeds and I liked this quotation chalked on a board in a café there. It’s how I feel most days. ‘What she was finding also was how one book lead to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long...
by beatriceotto | Sep 22, 2017 | print & publish
I have long put off writing this post because I have an aversion to it. A while back I bought a second hand book by Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (to be reviewed – at only 124 pages it packs in well over 124 things to think about or follow...
by beatriceotto | Sep 22, 2017 | print & publish
This lovely, zestful, imaginative novel has one of the protagonists finding a job in a bookshop. He tentatively shares with his boss the fact that he seems to be seeing things, namely a full grown living lion on the streets of a town far from any leonine landscapes. ...
by beatriceotto | Aug 11, 2017 | print & publish
I sometimes feel like this when we go to the flea market in Geneva and survey a lifetime’s worth of books chucked into banana boxes by the house clearance company sent to empty all trace of a life lived and ended. When I find something I can cherish among the...
by beatriceotto | Aug 11, 2017 | print & publish, readers & reading
A great riposte, of course, and true to a large extent. Having dismissed a book, it sometimes happens that I come back to it later, even decades later, and wonder at how absent I must have been at the previous encounter. This quotation is echoed much later in the...
