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Sunday, July 26, 2020

BW30: Miscellaneous Book Musings





A cup of tea and thee,
on a gadabout, a roundabout adventure. 
Let's walk and talk and muse,
About the day, the past, the future.
With a miscellany of essays,
Fictional and fun.
Cheers to Flufferton, 
Frissons of delight and
Fantastical creatures. 
No telling what we'll find,
To fill our minds
When we roam, ramble, and read
whatever comes to light. 


Today we celebrate the birth of George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Andre Maurois, Anwar Chairil, Ana MarĂ­a Matute Ausejo, and Lawrence Watt Evans.


Literary Musings

On Jane Austen’s Politics of Walking

An Illustrated Love Letter to Gardening

How literary censorship inspired creativity in Victorian writers

Why are we so interested in Historians?

T. S. Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1

The Rise of Science Fiction from Pulp Mags to Cyberpunk

What is your literary Waterloo?

How to Judge a Book by it's cover.


Have fun following rabbit trails!


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Sunday, July 19, 2020

BW29: A Girl's Garden






A Girl's Garden

By 

Robert Frost 

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,
Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, “I know!

It’s as when I was a farmer——”
Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.


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Sunday, July 12, 2020

BW28: Ode to Socks!




I’m in the mood to play.  Who thought reading about socks could be so much fun?   Shoes, Socks, Slippers, and Sandals, oh my!  Read a book with  socks on the cover, inside your wardrobe, or get creative with 35 Best Socks Books of All Time.  Even read a book about feet under the covers. Wink, wink!  Challenge yourself and read aloud the tongue twister Fox in Sock by Dr. Seuss. I guarantee a barrel of giggles throughout. 



Ode to My Socks

by 



Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as though into
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were
two fish made
of wool,
two long sharks
sea-blue, shot
through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so handsome
for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that woven
fire,
of those glowing
socks.

Nevertheless
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as learned men
collect
sacred texts,
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
into a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle who hand
over the very rare
green deer
to the spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the magnificent
socks
and then my shoes.


The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
in winter.





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Sunday, July 5, 2020

BW27: 52 Books Bingo - Whodunit Potpourri!



I was looking over our 52 books bingo categories and realized I built in quite a few  crossover categories,  Some of which are quite apropos to the present as well as the past.   So I decided to send you all on a scavenger hunt, from the top of the mountains, to the bottom of the sea. You can go off the grid, look for some enlightenment or something more elemental.  Be predictable or dance in the rain to the rhythm and blues. Explore the universe with Captain Kirk, or learn the ways of the force with Luke Skywalker.  

Choose a locked room mystery with a twenty something, or get a reality check from a femme fatale, who's really groovy, baby. Or maybe get involved with a computer hacker in a case of mistaken identity.  Pick a number and dive into the world of the unpredictable.

But wait!  Include an outlaw, cowboy, lawmen or a soldier, from any different time period, from the past to the future for a whodunit potpourri. Oh, the drama of it all.

Pick an author's name  and plug it into the Literature Map (used Nora Roberts as an example) and choose a different author to explore. Type their name into What Should I Read Next or explore books from their popular subjects lists.  Pick a book at random from your own shelves or use the Random Books for Everyone generator. 

Have fun! 


Please share your book reviews and link to your website, blog, Goodreads, Google+, Tumblers, or Instagram page. If you do not have a social media account, please leave a comment to let us know what you are reading. The link widget closes at the end of each book week.

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