MedlemDuneSherban

About My Library

I collect, borrow, beg and am gifted all sorts of books. And I like to browse bookshops, with the inevitable consequences (- money, - storage space).

"What I mean actually is the intervention of language upon you or into you. That famous line of Auden’s about Yeats: “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry—” What “hurts” you into poetry or literature is language, your sense of language. Not your private philosophy or your politics, nor even the creative urge, or youth."

- Joseph Brodsky

I enjoy language, the use of language, its impact on the reader; our "sense of language". I share Terry Eagleton's - rather informal - definition of what the study of literature at least should be: "close analysis of language, responsiveness to literary form, a sense of moral seriousness". But not too serious, eh Terry?

"what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time."
- Leon Wieseltier, Voluminous ... on collecting books.

About Me

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun"
- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim


"We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge."
- Vladimir Nabokov, Good Readers and Good Writers


"Alone... The word is life endured and known.
It is the stillness where our spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is overthrown."
- Siegfried Sassoon, Alone

Sted

London

Er ved at læse

Russian Thinkers (Penguin Classics) af Isaiah Berlin

The Dharma Bums (Penguin Modern Classics) af Jack Kerouac

Yndlingsforfattere

Nicholson Baker, Iain M. Banks, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Joseph Conrad, Lawrence Durrell, Umberto Eco, Venedikt Erofeev, Nikolai Gogol, Stephen Jay Gould, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Hardy, Frank Herbert, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mike Mignola, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Norfolk, Boris Pasternak, Andrey Platonov, Terry Pratchett, Thomas Pynchon, Siegfried Sassoon, Leo Tolstoy

Local Favorites

Boghandlere: Foyles (old Charing Cross branch), Gosh! Comics, Kirkdale Bookshop, London Review Bookshop, Orbital Comics

Member Connections

Venner

CrossedPolars

Interesting Library

tomcatMurr