Guess what I received in the mail yesterday? In my hot little hands I have a copy of Litlove's just published book, The Best of Tales from the Reading Room. It's a lovely, trade sized paperback with a generous selection of her essays that she wrote between April 2006 and November of 2007 which appeared on her blog. Scanning the table of contents I recognize a few favorites, which I look forward to revisiting, as well as more than a few that I missed the first time around. While I admit I am fairly addicted to blog reading on the computer, there is something comforting about having a nice book of essays by a writer/blogger I admire that I can keep close by my bedside and dip into whenever the mood strikes. In her introduction to the book, Litlove talks about the impetus to start a blog. Initially it was due to an illness that caused an interruption in her academic teaching and cut her off from discussions with her students.
"What blogging allowed me to do was to write about books with a flexibility that I had never previously enjoyed. Academic writing is a very restrained form of discourse, one in which the subjectivity of the reader is rigorously excluded. This is fine as far as it goes, but of course one never reads that way. Reading is about stitching ourselves into the story, living it as if it were our own, carrying away in our hearts a fresh store of insight and enlightenment. It's about feeling more alive because of reading , more in touch with our experience. Academics is no place for passion, but in blogging I could write about literature and life as they existed in the world; fiercely bound together, mutually informative, intertwined."
These sentiments are what I love about the (book) blogging world (I think what Litlove feels is fairly universal amongst readers), and I am quite pleased it has spilled over into a book! Now I just curious about the stack of books on the cover. Are they from Litlove's library, and what good books are hiding there?
I'm also quite excited as two books that I requested from my library's interlibrary loan service arrived today (yay for ILL). Both are books published in the UK that I'd love to own, but the cost of ordering (both are still in hardcover) is somewhat prohibitive at the moment. Borrowing is always the next best thing to buying for me. Both books are nonfiction. Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson is an anecdotal rendering of that generation of women born between 1885 and 1905 who were cheated out of marriage because of the deaths of so many men (three quarters of a million) during World War I. Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service by Alison Light seems to be not only about Virginia Woolf's love hate relationship (apparently--I've not read them--there are all sorts of references in her diaries) with her servants, but also a sort of history of the domestic service in general. I've heard very good things about both books, and they seem to be perfect choices (particularly as they are nonfiction) as background information for novels that I seem to be reading at the moment (or have plans to read). I seem to have a little queue now going for my lone NF read (one at a time is about what I can handle). I can see what I'll be concentrating on in the next few weeks.