Book Mania!

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.

Nabokov’s interview, BBC Television [1962]

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Livraria Lello & Irmão, Central Porto, Portugal, circa 1906. (Photo by Aurélio da Paz dos Reis)

from Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate) by Laura Esquivel

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” (Original quote from G.K. Chesterton preceding Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline) Here’s how to get enough cash to buy books. Click here! (via afilmandlitlover)

Novel set in North Korea ends Pulitzer draught

“A daring and remarkable novel.” — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year.

The book’s protagonist is a young man who grows to become a threat to the dictator Kim Jong-il, and then attempts to get his wife and get rid of the children out of North Korea.

Last year, no book won the prize. Finalists this year included What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander, and The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey.

You don’t have to think about love; you either feel it or you don’t.

Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate)

Those huge stars have lasted for million of years by taking care never to absorb any of the fiery rays lovers all over the world send up at them night after night. To avoid that, the star generates so much heat inside itself that it shatters the rays into a thousand pieces. Any look it receives is immediately repulsed, reflected back onto the earth, like a trick done with mirrors. That is the reason the stars shine so brightly at night.

Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate)

A fellow book lover Loise sent me an e-mail with these satiating photos of her newfound bookshop in Coventry (Northwest of Central London). Gosford Books is made on the model of BlackBooks, and according to our dear book lover Loise, the owner is a nice and funny old man.

I’d love to post about the bookshops you drop by in your area. If you do want to share your bookshop adventures and make them known, I’m just an e-mail away! :)

from Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris

Barter Books, Alnwick. Back in April 1991, and in the face of a rather large overdraft, Mary Manley decided to open a secondhand bookshop - one that would be based on the swap system and called Barter Books. Her husband, Stuart, immediately took to the idea and suggested that Mary open the shop in the front room of what was then his small manufacturing plant, located in Alnwick’s magnificent old Victorian railway station. From that time a joint partnership was formed that would eventually result in what the New Statesman magazine would call ‘The British Library of secondhand bookshops’. It was where the original ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ WWII poster was rediscovered. (Photo by Dave Morris)