Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
It is that time of year when I yearn for the desert isles of the world in the warmer climes; the ones with white sands, palm trees that don’t shed nuts on your head, and waves rolling in on the beach with a sound like thunder. At night, the organ-like sounds of a Steel Band drift over you.
Depending on where you live this winter, I expect the clothing issue on our 70 degree isle will divide into people from the North wearing shorts, T-shirts and sandals on one side who are living in silk tents whose sides roll up in the daytime to let breezes through; and people from Florida and Southern California wearing flannel-lined jeans, sweaters, vests and little knit hats who are living in yurts. It is all good.
Because it is a fantasy, the Isle will also have really clean modern restrooms, beach chairs near the water so we can hear the waves rolling in while we read, and lots of food carts with things for sale like Orange Julius drinks, hot-buttered popcorn, hotdogs, ice cream, coffee and doughnuts, croissants, and peanuts. We won’t gain an ounce because we will stop reading once in a while to play volleyball. I used to have a good serve.
But the heart of the matter of the game is that we are only allowed to bring twenty books with us and I hope you will list your choices in the comments. I could not stand to choose only twenty if I didn’t know that you all will share yours with me.
My lists each year are often the same books, I admit. These are books I have already read several times and always find something new when I re-read them. They are comfort books, too.
I will allow sets of series books by an author to count as one book each and collected works count as one when they are in one book. I will also allow one set of books with one main character (see my Cadfael on the list below).
If it is still too hard, go ahead and list all the books that you want. I will be glad to be able to borrow from you.
plf used to say when we played this game that his son recommended we bring a book about how to build a boat. Good idea!!!
My list:
1. Shakespeare’s Plays and Sonnets
2. The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett (series)
3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
4. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
5. Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955
6. War and Peace by Tolstoy
7. Mrs. Mike by the Freedman’s
8. Shane by Jack Schaefer
9. The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry ed. by Paul Muldoon (Poems by Patrick Kavanagh, Louis Macneice, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Tom Paulin, Medbh McGuckian)
10. Gettysburg by Stephen Sears
11. Chesapeake by James Michener
12. Dragondoom by Dennis L. McKiernan
13. The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip (series)
14. The Guns of Navarone by Alistair MacLean
15. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
16. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
17. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
18. The Sword books by Saberhagen (series)
19. Middlemarch by George Eliot
20. Cadfael by Ellis Peters (series, the whole set)
One poem just for fun that is in the Irish poem book:
"Leaving Inishmore"
Michael Longley
Rain and sunlight and the boat between them
Shifted whole hillsides through the afternoon –
Quiet variations on an urgent theme
Reminding me now that we left too soon
The island awash in wave and anthem.
Miles from the brimming enclave of the bay
I hear again the Atlantic's voices,
the gulls above us as we pulled away –
So munificent their final noises
These are the broadcasts from our holiday.
Oh, the crooked walkers on that tilting floor!
And the girls singing on the upper deck
Whose hair took the light like a downpour –
Interim nor change of scene shall shipwreck
Those folk on the move between shore and shore.
Summer and solstice as the seasons turn
Anchor our boat in a perfect standstill,
The harbour wall of Inishmore astern
Where the Atlantic waters overspill –
I shall name this the point of no return
Lest that excursion out of light and heat
Take on a January idiom –
Our ocean icebound when the year is hurt,
Wintertime past cure - the curriculum
Vitae of sailors and the sick at heart.
http://thepoeticquotidian.blogspot.com/...
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! A Scribble of Writers
by Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
http://www.dailykos.com/...
NOTE: plf515 is taking a break from WAYR. I am sending him best wishes and hoping he will be back soon.