Member: SilentInAWay

CollectionsYour library (7,536), (poetry & poetics) (1,258), (philosophy & criticism) (1,421), (spain & latin america) (1,101), (music, art & architecture) (682), (Easton Press volumes) (715), Essential Library (6,815), Accidental Library (721), Currently reading (6), All collections (7,536)

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Tags20th century (4,024), literature (3,814), fiction (2,829), world literature (2,406), translation (2,395), novel (2,335), poetry (1,244), american literature (1,165), british/american fiction (1,016), criticism (990) — see all tags

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GroupsBoard for Extreme Thing Advances, Bug Collectors, Combiners!, Common Knowledge, WikiThing, HelpThing, Easton Press Collectors, G*U*L*I*S*T*A*N, More Power to the Date Fields!, The Hellfire Club

Favorite authorsDante Alighieri, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Amy Clampitt, Michel Foucault, Elizabeth George, Knut Hamsun, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, George du Maurier, Ian McEwan, W.S. Merwin, Yukio Mishima, Pablo Neruda, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Miguel de Cervantes, Murasaki Shikibu, Rex Stout, Rabindranath Tagore, Paco Ignacio Taibo, W. B. Yeats (Shared favorites)

Favorite bookstoresBeijing Books Building (Xidan Bookstore) [西单北京图书大厦], Cultura Latina Bookstore, Librería El Parnaso, Librería Martínez, Renaissance Books, The Bookman, UCI Bookstore

About me"In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited." (Schopenhauer)

"To a greater or lesser degree every man is suspended upon narratives, on novels, which reveal to him the multiplicity of life. Only these narratives, often read in a trance, situate him before his fate." (Georges Bataille)

"Wide reading shows that most ways of life should be viewed with tolerance, in context, and that we can learn from the collective experience of those who have lived before if we read critically, sceptically, and sympathetically." (Philip Ward)

"Un bibliófilo pobre tiene infinitas ocasiones de sufrir. Los libros no se le escapan de las manos, sino que le pasan por el aire, a vuelo de pájaro, a vuelo de precios." (Pablo Neruda)

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About my library"A library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences. Particularly is this the case if to the character of a collector he adds - or tries to add - the qualities of a student who wishes to know the books and the lives of the men who wrote them. The friendships of his life, the phases of his growth, the vagaries of his mind, all are represented." (Sir William Osler)

“Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness." (Walter Benjamin)

"Books are tokens of identity" (Adam Kirsch)

"Could you be a fan of Santana and Joyce? A fan of Wagner and Frank Miller comic books? Eclecticism carried a heavy does of guilt with it. It's an effort to be impure. Guilt was all right, it was as good a motive as any other, just as long as it did not show too much." (José Daniel Fierro, in Paco Ignacio Taibo's Leonardo's Bicycle)

"Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam" (Erasmus)

"I know why you want me to go to the library. You're trying to trick me into learning how to read. That's what you're trying to do. Who cares about reading? The next thing you know, you want me to conjugate all those verbs and split those infinitives. I hate reading. I just want to be a good housewife." (Sally Brown)

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Membership LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Member Giveaway

LocationCorona, California

Account typepublic, lifetime

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/SilentInAWay (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/SilentInAWay (library)

Member sinceJan 13, 2007

Currently readingReversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry by Mónica de la Torre
Piano Sonata No. 2 - "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860" [sheet music] by Charles Ives
Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority and Other Writings by Charles Ives
One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Best European Fiction 2012 by Aleksandar Hemon
The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo
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