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Posts Tagged ‘libraries’

Gone Girl, Lost Jacket

Friday, October 11th, 2013

The saga of reading the dusty books on my shelf continues! This time I picked up Gone Girl Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

gone-girl-book-cover (1)

I came across this book in sort of a strange way (ok, maybe not that strange). I hadn’t heard about it at all, despite the rush of posts about the upcoming movie, until my father gave me a copy. He had happened across it somehow and had no use for it, so he gave it to me, the Daughter Who Reads A Lot. It’s a hardcover copy which is missing a dust jacket, so I couldn’t check out the synopsis. Instead of looking up the book on Amazon I decided to start reading without any information.

This brings me to the topic of today’s blog post: the novelty of reading a book with no prior knowledge, and no assumptions. I can’t remember the last time I started reading a book without knowing the author’s work, or reading the synopsis, or finding some reviews online, or going off the recommendation of a friend. I don’t buy books without at least looking at the back cover to check out the synopsis, and I don’t think I’m alone in this habit. Even if I ignored the synopsis, it’s difficult to avoid the multitude of media entries that cover new books. It’s a wonder I managed to avoid the articles gushing about the casting for the Gone Girl movie, expected to come out in 2014.

Happily, your local library might be able to help you out. You might have heard of the blind date with a book, the trend that’s sweeping the nation!

Microsoft Word - Blind Date with a Book pic.docx

The idea is, if you haven’t yet heard of it, to give brief details about the subject matter (e.g. thriller, non-fiction, history) and maybe a few quick facts. This won’t help you out with recognizing the book once you’ve ripped the packaging, but it might help you in your ambling search through the aisles.

As far as my opinion of Gone Girl, I read it in about three days. I started out hating the two main characters- which I believe is intentional, having now finished the book and looked up reviews- and certainly had no idea that the wife would suddenly disappear, something I would have known if I’d read the synopsis. There’s a huge plot twist which I won’t spoil, so if I were you I would check this book out! I’m also excited to see the movie when it comes out. The casting seems great so far. I’m especially excited about Niel Patrick Harris- of course, he’s always the right choice (well documented fact based on my highly esteemed opinion), and this role seems especially perfect.

I am now reading a crime thriller, as I seem to be on a thriller kick. This one is by Marcia Muller, who shares my last name. Did I buy it because we have the same last name? Yes. Yes I did. After I finish this, however, I think I will have to start digging into the top shelf on my bookcase. I affectionately call it the I Have a BA In English, I Should Be Reading These shelf. It’s not my favorite shelf.

-A Little Beau Told Me

PlaceBEAU: An Introduction

Monday, March 18th, 2013

Hello all!  I am Elizabeth, one of Beaufort’s spring interns, but I’ll be going by the name PlaceBEAU.  I’ve been here since January, lurking in the background, but I’ve put off blogging because I wasn’t quite sure how to introduce myself.  But I figured it’s always good to begin at the beginning, and at the beginning, for me, are books.

Like most people who go into publishing, I love books.  Whether I’m diving into some else’s life in a biography or memoir, exploring a whole new perspective on a topic I thought I knew, or wading through a fictional world where characters battle overbearing mothers-in-law, evil wizards, conquering invaders, their own inner demons, or all of the above, for me reading is very much an escape and an adventure.  But it’s not only the stories housed in paper and ink bindings, but the books themselves that I love.

I can remember at a very young age accompanying my grandmother to the Mount Vernon Public Library, a neoclassical revival behemoth, originally funded by Andrew Carnegie.  The cool, dim lobby served as a portal between the loud, bright, and gritty world outside and the serene, hushed, and ethereal realm within.

I remember whispering quietly in the children’s section, mouthing the words carefully as I devoured book after book, piling them up neatly beside me before delivering them in a swaying stack to the stony-faced librarians to reshelve.  I recall lugging huge encyclopedic tomes to battered library tables, where I composed my middle school research projects.  My high school years were spent drifting in and out of bookstores, sneaking away from my latte-clutching friends perusing the magazines to take a quick peek at the sci-fi/fantasy section for new arrivals.  In college, I practically lived in the library, myself now a latte-clutcher, camped out between some infrequently visited stacks.  The highlight of my grad school experience was a visit to the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I was allowed to briefly handle a few medieval manuscripts.  To this day, the smell of paper, dust and glue is both comforting and exciting all at once.

To that end, I thought the perfect introduction would be to share some of my absolute favorite libraries, both in the U.S. and abroad.

New York Public Library

New York Public Library – New York, NY.  The NYPL is the second largest public library in the U.S., second only to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The library originated in the 19th century, and its founding and roots are the amalgamation of grass-roots libraries, social libraries of bibliophiles and the wealthy, and from philanthropy of the wealthiest Americans of their age.

Library of Parliament

Library of Parliament (French: Bibliothèque du Parlement) – Ottawa, Canada. The Library of Parliament was designed as a chapter house, and was inspired by the British Museum Reading Room.  Its collection comprises 600,000 items, covering hundreds of years of history, and employs a staff of 300.  Unfortunately, access to the library is generally restricted to those on parliamentary business, and not everyone gets a chance to explore the stacks.

Trinity College Library

Trinity College Library – Dublin, Ireland.  Trinity College is Ireland’s oldest university, and the Trinity College Library is Ireland’s largest research library.  The oldest and rarest of the library’s collection is housed in the Long Room, the largest single-chamber library in the world, with over 200,000 volumes preserved inside.  Supposedly, Trinity’s Long Room served as the “unofficial” inspiration for the Jedi Archives in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

Library of Congress

Library of Congress – Washington, D.C.  The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world – it has over 151.8 million items and 838 miles of bookshelves.  The smallest book in its collection is a tiny copy of Old King Cole – 1/25″ x 1/25″ – which is so tiny the pages can only be turned with the assistance of a needle.  Though it’s open to the public, only library employees, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and other high-ranking government officials are allowed to check out books.

Melk Library

Stift Melk – Melk, Austria. Stift Melk, or Melk Abbey, is a Benedictine abbey in Austria, and is among the world’s most famous monastic sites.  The Library is decorated in the Baroque style like the rest of the Abbey, with gilded everything and frescoes galore.  While it’s not a lending library at all, and visitors are encouraged to not-touch-anything-please, its off-limits collection conjures images in my historian’s mind, of long-ago monks carefully paging through leather-bound tomes.

 

-Placebeau