Charl08 reads the year through #13

... a grim thought takes hold of me. If we're abolishing redundant nineteenth-century artefacts, why can't we also say goodbye to the institution of monogamous, romantic marriage and all its corrupted offshoots? The parliament of penguins would agree with me. Look at them happily sliding along on their fat bellies, waddling around without a care in the world. No jealousy, no possessiveness - it's much too cold outside for any of that. All penguins love all other penguins, right?

'But why would he do that?' says Edwin. 'I don't understand any of it. He takes a peevish bite of brownie.

"The answer might be in the book,' says Benedict. 'I bought a copy of High Rise Murder yesterday. I'll see if I can get hold of the Sheila Atkins book, Thank Heaven Fasting.

Reading won't help,' says Natalka. 'We need action.....

And maybe sometimes you might think someone who's bad can still become good? Yes, my neighbour said again. That's the kind of thing you think when you're young.

Not long after the liberation, my neighbour had been on the tram in Amsterdam. It was busy and hot. She'd taken off her jumper: people could see the number on her arm. Hey, a blonde woman had yelled through the tram. Look at her, she's got a number tattooed on her arm.
It's my phone number, my neighbour had said quickly.
When she'd got home, she'd felt ashamed of her reply. Why hadn't she just told the truth? Why don't people just tell the truth? She'd decided to call the number on her arm. Turned out it was the number for the Amsterdam Central Library.

Once a holiday becomes a bit of a chore, you know it's time to leave. You get a little tired having to find new places to eat every lunch and dinner, fed up of forcing yourself to be cultured all the time, less keen on experiencing new things. You need space and time, familiar surroundings, to let these new experiences sink in. The crowds of people every day, our fellow tourists, fighting our way through swathes of selfie sticks held as menacingly as rifles. We saw the contempt in the eyes of the city's residents... Our senses were completely overwhelmed.

Most surviving papyrus was found as waste material, in rubbish heaps in Egypt (like the famous site of Oxyrhynchus) or as cartonnage material used to wrap mummified bodies. The number of surviving libraries of papyrus scrolls is tiny, with the most famous being at Herculaneum - where the 'Villa of the Papyri was discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century sealed under the tsunami of volcanic ash that came out of nearby Mount Vesuvius in CE 79. Eventually over 1,700 scrolls were excavated there, most charred or completely fused by the heat of the eruption. Enough of them are readable for us to know that the collector behind the library must have been fascinated by Greek philosophy (especially that of Philodemus)." The fragile scrolls are still being unrolled and 19 deciphered, most recently via X-ray: in 2018 it was announced that part of Seneca's famous lost Histories had been discovered on one of them.

It's rare to see people with a book on their lap. Some women perhaps, but men hardly ever. They like to have magazines and newspapers in their hands, or more likely, a remote control. These are the times we live in. People don't realise that with the help of books, they create the images of their dreams themselves; that reading develops and tends to their imagination, whereas television thrusts these images upon them. When we read, the images we create are our own, but on TV we're watching foreign ones. Television programmes violate our dream world. All the pictures that we watch enter into our subconscious, which is why we're increasingly distracted and restless. The scenes of our subconscious are scenes of horror.

Distance Learning: Day 4 🙃 pic.twitter.com/rAShlbpffi

— Chrissy Newell (@MrsNewell22) September 11, 2020

For a long time I put off reading The Making of Americans. Every time I picked up the book, I put it down again. It was too heavy and thick and the type was too small and dense. I finally solved the problem of the book's weight and bulk by taking a kitchen knife and cutting it into six sections. The book thus became portable and (so to speak) readable. As I read, I realized that in carving up the book I had unwittingly made a physical fact of its stylistic and thematic inchoateness. It is a book that is actually a number of books. It is called a novel, but in reality it is a series of long meditations on, among other things, the author's refusal (and inability) to write a novel.

But what do we know? Perhaps Stein had a secret Jewish life. Biography and autobiogra phy are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell. A cache of letters between Stein and a rabbi may be discovered that will cast a whole new light on Stein's Jewish identity. Such discoveries are a regular inconvenience of the biographical enterprise.

Liz carried on with her stories about Great Britain. When she went to London, the sky was leaden and smoky from the locomotives and factories, and the almost incessant rain had a sharp tang to it. The air she breathed was damp and grey, with a strange orangey tint, and so heavy and thick that she could almost see it. Yet as soon as she left the city behind the light gleamed on unbroken fields of grass that stretched all the way to cliffs pounded by the sea. The land ends abruptly there, as if England had been cut off from the rest of the world with an axe, as if the land had been forcibly condemned to an insularity which those of us who live there, we, the British, darling, try to overcome by dint of force, making ourselves the centre, organising the world around us, being the motor, market and matrix of all nations.

Dean frowns. What're yer saying, Frank? That Laurel Canyon's a bloodbath waiting to happen?'
I'm saying, replies Frank, that if you ever think, I've found Paradise, you are not in possession of the facts. Don't be dazzled by peacocks either. They're vain, ornery sons-of-bitches who shit like it's going out of style.

He thought that the grounds, as he called them, included something about the size of these vehicles or vessels and the historical development of public transport. There had been no omnibuses in hunter gatherer societies as far as he knew; at least, if such public transport vehicles existed, then they were not depicted in any of the cave art of such peoples that was currently extant, nor has any archaeological evidence been found. He thought that perhaps there had not, in the olden days, been an imperative for the public to travel en masse and quickly from one pre ordained destination to another on paying the necessary fare for the journey.

Was he content with that as a definition of public transport?

Yes. Very.

Good. He may wish to return to it later.

Kosuke's amazement was in fact understandable. The col lection comprised every book of mystery or detective fiction ever published in Japan, both domestic and foreign. There was the whole collection of Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice leblanc's Lupin series, and every translated work that the pub lishers Hakubunkan and Heibonsha had ever released. Then there was the Japanese section: it began with nineteenth century novels by Ruiko Kuroiwa, and also featured Edogawa Ranpo, Fuboku Kozakai, Saburo Koga, Udaru Oshita, Takataro Kigi. Juza Unno, Mushitaro Oguri all crammed in together. And then as well as Japanese translations of Western novels, there were the original, untranslated works of Ellery Queen, Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts and Agatha Christie, etc. etc. etc. It was a magnificent sight: an entire library of detective novels.

"W-who does th-this collection b-belong to?"