Whenever I liked, I could swim out from the Brownsville shore to that calm and sunlit sea beyond where great friends came up from the deep. Every book I read re-stocked my mind with those great friends who lived out of Brownsville. They came into my life proud and compassionate, recognizing me by a secret sign, whispering through subterranean channels of sympathy.
We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
The Big Green Book – Maurice Sendak’s little-known and lovely collaboration with Robert Graves, a vintage children’s book celebrating the magic of reading and how books transform us. More here.
If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this improve the quality of his work?
Virginia Woolf, born on this day in 1882, on how to read a book.
Happy birthday, C.S. Lewis! The beloved writer on why we read.
The Pages Project – magnificent celebration of marginalia and the art of reading by Berkley-based designer Erik Schmitt, who was on the design team for the first generation of Kindle e-readers as he inherited inherited a large portion of his grandfather’s library and found himself enchanted by the humanity of marginalia, destined to disappear in ebooks.
I’ll be looking for the one that says “The giraffe speaks!”
Also see Mortimer Adler on the joy and dignity of marginalia.
As Open Culture explains, this rare 1924 recording of Joyce reading from the Aeolus episode of the novel was arranged and financed by his friend and publisher Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone studio in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. She writes in her memoir, Shakespeare & Company:
Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.
I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out–”he lifted his voice above it boldly”–it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.
Pair with these rare 1935 illustrations for Ulysses by none other than Henri Matisse.
