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Member: jveezer

CollectionsTo Read - Poetry (6), Your library (1,138), Books on Order (6), Currently reading (4), To read (53), To Read - Challenging Queue (5), Wishlist (28), All collections (1,172)

Reviews48 reviews

TagsLibrary-Main (596), Fiction (367), First Edition (322), Read (314), American Literature (219), Folio Society (205), Paperback (171), Leather Bound (154), Easton Press (146), English Literature (138) — see all tags

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GroupsBook Care and Repair, Fine Press Forum, Folio Society devotees, George Macy devotees, Proust, ReJoyce, Sitting on a pumpkin..., South American Fiction-Argentine Writers

Favorite authorsRoberto Bolaño, Joseph Conrad, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Joyce, Morgan Llywelyn, Gabriel García Márquez, Patricia A. McKillip, Michael Moorcock, Pablo Neruda, Marcel Proust, Hyemeyohsts Storm, Henry David Thoreau, J. R. R. Tolkien, Howard Zinn (Shared favorites)

Favorite bookstoresThe Bookman

About me"If you are not reading and writing poetry, you are suffering from linguistic malnutrition."
—Philip Howard

"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book." --Groucho Marx

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. - Jorge Luis Borges

"Salgo, saciado de puertas y calles,
A buscar algo gue allí no perdí."
I set out, fed up with doorways and streets,
to search for something I never lost there.
-- Pablo Neruda, from The Separate Rose

Now reading:

And Let the Earth Tremble at it's Centers by Gonzalo Celorio
"And there's nothing like tequila to cure a hangover. It puts your stomach in order, reconnects all of the bones in your body, and brings light to your dark thoughts and the blindness of your mind. It also prepares you for the next round. Here's your theory: the first shot of tequila rescues you from lethargy; the second shot produces happiness and euphoria; and the third creates a feeling of serenity. However, the fourth shot can be dangerous. It might incite depression. Anything after that, you lose. One should never drink more than three shots of tequila." -p.31

Como Agua Para Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

And for poetry:


And, of course, some drama:


________________________________________...

Just read:

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe

Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea

History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell

Stitches by David Small

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

House Made of Dawn Past by N. Scott Momaday

The Mad Farmer Poems by Wendell Berry

Days of Reading Past by Marcel Proust

"We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is it to be done by halves or shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all" -p. 21

"There are no days of my childhood which I lived so fully perhaps as those I thought I had left behind without living them, those I spent with a favorite book." --p. 49

"Reading is on the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it." --p. 72

"There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to. We often take leave of them, at least, only with regret. And once we have left them, none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: 'What did they think of us?' 'Were we not tactless?' 'Did they like us?' Or the fear of being forgotten in favor of someone else. All these qualms of friendship expire on the threshold of the pure and peaceful form of it that is reading. There is no deference either, we laugh at what Moliere has to say only just so far as we find it funny; when he bored us we are not afraid to look bored, and once we have definitely had enough of him we put him back in his place as abruptly as if he had neither genius or celebrity. The atmosphere of this pure form of friendship is silence, which is purer than speech. Because we speak for others, but remain silent for ourselves. So silence, unlike speech, does not bear the trace of our faults or affectations. It is pure, it is genuinely an atmosphere." --p.82

"For as long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our life is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our own heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body." --p. 75

New Penguin Parallel Text: Short Stories in Spanish

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird (1879)

The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and 'devilry' as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilization. The only difference between the savage and the civilized Indian is that the latter carries firearms and gets drunk on whiskey. The Indian Agency has been a sink of fraud and corruption; it si said that barely thirty per cent of the allowance ever reaches those for whom it is voted; and the complaints of shoddy blankets, damaged flour, and worthless firearms are universal." -p. 129

"Agriculture restores and beautifies, mining destroys and devastates; turning the earth inside out, making it hideous, and blighting every green thing, as it usually blights man's heart and soul." - p. 134

"Surely one advantage of traveling is that, while it removes much prejudice against foreigners and their customs, it intensifies tenfold one's appreciation of the good at home..." - p. 162

2666 by Roberto Bolano

Window Poems by Wendell Berry

Julius Ceasar by William Shakespeare

Il Bosco di Tamarindi by Carlo Toselli

Sampler by Emily Dickenson

Unto my books, so good to turn,
Far ends of tired days,
It half endears the abstinence,
And pain is missed in praise.

As flavors cheer retarded guests
With banquetings to be,
So spices stimulate the time
Till my small library.

It may be wilderness without,
Far feet of failing men,
But holiday excludes the night,
And it is bells within.

I thank these kinsmen of the shelf,
Their countenances kid,
Enamor, in prospective,
And satisfy, obtained.

The War of the Saints by Jorge Amado

...He'd come at her call to pluck the petals of the roses of the night with her. --p. 225

21 Songs by Jan Zwicky

Journey Round My Room by Xavier de Maistre

Twelfth Night by the Bard

Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin


Poetry as Insurgent Art by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

Labyrinths by Jorges Luis Borges

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel


James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell & Henry Morton Robinson.

...and also In Search of Lost Time by Proust:
Vol. 1: Swann's Way....check!
Vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove...check!!
Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way...check!!!
Vol. 4: Sodom and Gomorrah...check!!!!
Vol. 5: The Captive...check!!!!!
Vol. 6: The Fugitive / Time Regained
I've reached la fin de siècle!

About my libraryMy library is an eclectic mix of books and topics but the one common thread is that I almost always want readable books. Meaning I seldom buy a book that I don't intend to read or that is physically not readable. There are (of course!) some exceptions. I may have several editions of favorite books or authors, especially if there are several different illustrators or other unique features of an edition.

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Emailjveezercox.net

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Common KnowledgeSeries (150), Awards (228), Characters (3352), Places (597)

Member sinceJul 7, 2006

Currently readingArabian Nights: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night by Powys Mathers
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Hands of Day by Pablo Neruda
Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel