Member SilentInAWay

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 dose of guilt with it. It's an effort to be impure." (José Daniel Fierro, in Paco Ignacio Taibo's Leonardo's Bicycle)

"As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot." (Carlos Ruiz Zafón, in The Shadow of the Wind)

"The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential." (Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet)

Visitors Map:



Countdown to Quality (Covers to Replace):

06/09/2012 : 2429 remaining (2001 low-quality + 428 amazon)
06/27/2012 : 2398 remaining (1976 low-quality + 422 amazon)
07/08/2012 : 2354 remaining (1939 low-quality + 415 amazon)
08/18/2012 : 2314 remaining (1908 low-quality + 406 amazon)
10/21/2012 : 2284 remaining (1882 low-quality + 402 amazon)
11/19/2012 : 2223 remaining (1824 low-quality + 399 amazon)
01/30/2013 : 2198 remaining (1810 low-quality + 388 amazon)
05/22/2013 : 2157 remaining (1774 low-quality + 383 amazon)
07/10/2013 : 2101 remaining (1723 low-quality + 378 amazon)
02/08/2014 : 2003 remaining (1660 low-quality + 343 amazon)
01/31/2015 : 1912 remaining (1612 low-quality + 300 amazon)
05/04/2015 : 1843 remaining (1588 low-quality + 255 amazon)
06/26/2016 : 1737 remaining (1503 low-quality + 234 amazon)
09/10/2020 : 1635 remaining (1417 low-quality + 218 amazon)

Closing Thoughts:

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you." (Mortimer J. Adler)

Tsundoku (積ん読) - "the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other such unread books." (Wiktionary)

“No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month, I keep the others in my office.” (Umberto Eco)

"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)

"Without Emotion there is no Memory, without Memory there is no Justice, without Justice there is no Civilization, without Civilization human beings have no future." (Jordi Savall)

"Sweet God, poetry hates Boston." (Jack Spicer)

About Me

Recently read:





"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)

"My motto, to the extent that I have one, has been noted often enough, and I've always conformed to it. It's the one I've given to old Maigret, who resembles me in certain points...'understand and judge not'" (Georges Simenon)

"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)

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

Currently reading (long term):

Location

Corona, California

Memberships

TinyCat

LibraryThing Early Reviewers

Currently Reading

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

Favorite Authors

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rabih Alameddine, Dante Alighieri, Matsuo Bashō, Walter Benjamin, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Amy Clampitt, Don DeLillo, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Michel Foucault, Carlos Fuentes, Elizabeth George, Knut Hamsun, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Ngaio Marsh, George du Maurier, Ian McEwan, W. S. Merwin, Yukio Mishima, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Miguel de Cervantes, Juan José Saer, Vijay Seshadri, Murasaki Shikibu, Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Rabindranath Tagore, Marina Tsvetaeva, William Butler Yeats

Local Favorites

Bookstores: Beijing Books Building (Xidan Bookstore) [西单北京图书大厦], Cultura Latina Bookstore, Librería El Parnaso, Librería Martínez de Chapman University, Renaissance Books, The Bookman, UCI Bookstore

Member Connections

Friends

ironjaw, LastDarkAngel, TheresaWilliams

Interesting Library

Africansky1, alanteder, almigwin, andreajorgensen, AnneDC, arubabookwoman, Brasidas, bridgitshearth, brunolatini, cait815, Cariola, Civitella, clarkpoetry, curioussquared, dreamingtereza, drspkelly, elenchus, ELiz_M, emaestra, enkyklios, fieldnotes, gravitysbook, Gypsy_Boy, Himalmitra, hippietrail, homeless, ifindmbr, ifjuly, IsolaBlue, jkcohen, JNagarya, joannasephine, JuliaBoechat, KarenFunt, KimB, kiparsky, kpclarke, LolaWalser, lriley, lulaa, mcarmenbriones, Medellia, mermind, msjohns615, Naren559, PandorasRequiem, parmaviolet, Pfanner, Proclus, proustitute, Quixada, rachelmarlene, Randy_Hierodule, RickKrause, rolandperkins, Samuel.Sotillo, SassyLassy, shigekuni, slickdpdx, sollocks, SoschaF, sriq, sycoraxpine, sylphette, TePuruBeach, terribly, thalassa_thalassa, Thinandlight, toast_and_tea, urania1, wildbadger, wordgame

Interesting library (inactive)

Celestina83, ctorre, Eurydice, gbusters, ginaruiz, jicuri, LAWood, m.gilbert, manolis, matematichica, NativeRoses, ostrom, tamara_gm3, taralindsey