Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Hey I'm sure that, given the choice, he would totally have done that.
My Mom was ordering vitamins from a catalog by phone,and the sales person asked her if she wanted an herb that would stop her aging. Her response: "I'm 91. I'll stop aging soon enough, but I intend to postpone it as long as possible."
Seamus Heaney has died, at only 74.
In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald
The socket of each axehead like the squared
Doorway to a megalithic tomb
With its slabbed passage that keeps opening forward
To face another corbelled stone-faced door
That opens on a third. There is no last door,
Just threshold stone, stone jambs, stone crossbeam
Repeating enter, enter, enter, enter.
Lintel and upright fly past in the dark.
After the bowstring sang a swallow’s note,
The arrow whose migration is its mark
Leaves a whispered breath in every socket.
The great test over, while the gut’s still humming,
This time it travels out of all knowing
Perfectly aimed towards the vacant centre.
Seamus Heaney
I wrote one of my papers in college I was really proud of on his poem "Bone Dreams". What an amazing poet. RIP.
"Bone Dreams" ability to leap over time by thinking about language is so beautiful.
My professor (who as it turns out I was INCREDIBLY lucky to get as a freshman English major, and I count her as a formative influence on thinking about literature) - Robert Penn Warren's daughter - suggested, before we started on the essay, that we look at the Oxford English dictionary and try to follow the roots of the words in the poem. Something, I suspect, that Seamus hadn't done, but was probably in his bones, so to speak.
I need some book recs. I finished
The Passage
(and loved it), but I don't have the sequel yet. I finished the FitzOsborne books and loved them, too.
I need something I can escape into, something as page-turning as
The Passage.
To choose from I have
Wolf Hall, The Light Between Oceans, The Forgotten Garden, The Little Friend, Dark Places, A Discovery of Witches,
and Joe Hill's
Horns.
Thoughts? (There are dozens of others I could choose from, but I'm looking for longish, engrossing, really removed from my life.)
I would vote for Dark Places,but you didn't like Gone Girl, right? Or am I thinking of someone else? In which case I would vote for Horns, even though I didn't read it. I recently read his NOS4A2 and loved it.
No, I loved
Gone Girl
and started
Dark Places
and couldn't get into right away. I'm not sure I'm the mood for someone so hateful, though.
If you liked
NOS4A2,
try
Heart-Shaped Box,
his first. It was fantastic.
I hate to say this, because I loved "The Secret History" so, so much, but I found "The Little Friend" really quite boring. And on another downer note, I couldn't get through "A Discovery of Witches" and I was bummed, because I love a good academically oriented paranormal.
I quite like Kate Morton. "The Forgotten Garden" isn't my favorite, but it's nicely engrossing.
ETA: Oh, and for those who liked "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt, I highly rec "Waking the Moon" by Elizabeth Hand.