Shhh! I'm Reading.
Book reviews, dispatches from the publishing trenches and other literary ephemera.
To contact me regarding reviews or for more info on the blog, email: shhhimreading@gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter @shhhreading.
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Awesomeness alert! An interactive guide to navigating NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books (via sfsignal) Click through for larger...
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Had they not become two of Hollywood’s alpha comedy stars, were they not starring in Jeff, Who Lives at Home, the latest comedy from the brothers...
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Derrida reads.
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Just spent about an hour scuffling about in the hidden stacks of my university library searching for 18th century...
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Slightly Foxed makes some beautiful books. We’ve got a few in the office and they are mind-bendingly awesome. Here’s how they are made.
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“The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim”, by Iceberg Slim and Robert Beck on Flickr.
Read The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim
I thought I went...
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1 post tagged Sailing Alone Around the Room
Poem of the Week: “Marginalia”
New Feature! Poem of the Week will go up each Wednesday and will feature a poem and ruminations thereon.
This week’s poem is really my guy’s pick. It was him that put me on to Billy Collins. Like a lot of the poetry I’m attached to, it’s hard to recall where or when exactly it embedded itself in my consciousness. The guy can’t really remember either but he thinks it might have been discussed on a books program on the CBC. Funny how you can hear something casually and it continues to reverberate in your mind for years afterward. Poetic shipping news as it were. The delight of Collins for me is in how he takes the banal, things we look at or partake in every day, and rewrites them as moments of wonderment. He gives the reader new eyes. “Marginalia” is a favorite not only because it’s bookish and very funny but also because it is humane and intimate; all qualities shared by books and reading now that I think of it. It’s also uncannily true. It will make you smile and say “yes!” “I did do that when I was reading at school!” Which, is exactly what the poem does. That feeling of simpatico you have when you realize that your reaction is mirrored in the language of the poem? Yeah, that’s why Billy Collins is awesome.
Poem 2: “Marginalia”
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
