Brooklyn Book

npr:

View from Trans-Siberia Train #350 as it pulls out of the station in Moscow. Photo by NPR’s David Gilkey. (Taken with instagram)

Reading Travels in Siberia right now so this is perfect! 

taleofnerds:

HELLO AGAIN, ALL! Welcome back. How you been? You look good.

The book nerds are officially back for the summer, having read more, lived more, just generally more more. We’re not going to give a huge list of excuses for not posting in months (like new jobs, new living situations, school still exists). We’re just going to hope that you don’t hate us and start posting again! New reviews, new Friday Fives, and we promise to make it last through the summer! To celebrate the re-opening of A Tale of Two Book Nerds as well as the end of the year, the return of the sun, and the extra time you  have to spend in the library, we’re doing our first official RANDOM BOOK RANDOM GIVEAWAY.

Here’s how to enter:

1. Follow us
2. Re-blog this post

Winner will be announced July 2011. While we’re only giving away one free random book there will be some alternative ~prizes~ for runners-up. We guarantee that these ~prizes~, like this giveaway, will be random.

So, welcome back! Happy reading.

Welcome back!

“And so with the sunshine and the great burst of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with summer. There was so much to read, for one thing…”

-The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 

As promised, my pretty copy of Jane Eyre.

I didn’t make a resolution for this year, but I’m thinking that spending one night a week reading in a coffee shop might be a good one.

Housing Works new cafe next week?

beenthinking:

When you left (didn’t leave, actually…sludged away like an armless ferret if you want to know. Evaporated like color from tea, like color into water and water and water.) I had all the words. Ten thousand voices. I was a chorus. A cacophony of disbelief and foolishness and laments for lies and the garment-rending-bellow that can be the only response to You having unchosen Me (Any you, any me, given enough time and misunderstanding). Do you know this side step, reader? This failure to be caught, this decision not to stay and catch when we told everyone you would. (Though who ever chooses these things? You can say this from here. The color being back in your tea, and all.)

It feels like a long time ago now, and not. I could hold you up and examine you for signs of my life, left. For any old trigger that might make me burrow for a way home. But I would not find one. You write more now and all the stories have been sterilized. The we’s and the she’s precisely cut out so that anyone might imagine you had launched all those adventures alone. I suppose you did.

I remember the column of your shoulders, growing hard beside me in transit. What is lonelier than a bus ride, a train ride, a ferry boat ride beside a man who is turning to stone with the wild unspoken desire to have come alone. Being alone would be less lonely, I could tell you. (I travel now with someone whose face lights up when I turn to find it; he has been waiting. This is still a marvel.) 

Before I met you, I did travel alone. (Imagine that wind again. Thick with ruddy soil and dead fish baking on the river banks and stars, rushing through just your hair. Imagine no mascara, imagine no small talk and all those books.) With you, I was stuck. Half willing the regeneration of your enthusiasm on those ruined Khmer steps, in those longboats and noodle shops, on that inky mountain top. All angles and juts, all fallen expanses. Half calling come back to me, come back to me, come back to me. (How long were you gone before you left?) And half of me, my dear, was waiting to be free. Half of me was walking behind you in that market thinking God damn. God damn these wasted days. God damn you for your quiet disappointment. (I never became what you thought I was, did I?)

I had breakfast with an aging Catholic, a rich man. He’s studying the secret of happiness and he tells me you need to let go of it all. It’s not just the anger and jealousy and worry and fear. It’s the joy. It’s the pride and the happiness and the eagerness. All of it is keeping you from peace. You have to learn to live without emotions, he says, while the steam of his coffee is huffing on the window at his shoulder.  (We used to have breakfast here, ten percent of me is thinking. All these city scenes feel half true to me now. I am, like you were, half present.)  I nod robustly and say I Love That. But what I mean is that I love that you are talking to me about controlling our thoughts and panning for peace like gold instead of Charitable Gift Annuities and assets management. I love that you are human even if I actually hate this philosophy, which I do not realize until a red light, two hours later.

Actually. Leave me my erraticisms, I think then. Too late in my response. Leave me my frozen seas and my wild fires. You can keep your sedation.

I think back on you. On the years. The hours. The borders. I was never numb. But you were. (And I’d wager that it never felt like happiness). My appetite for you (Didn’t I always want what I couldn’t have? Didn’t I make a career out of overestimation?) and my demolition in your disappearance, in my misunderstanding…I wouldn’t undo them.  Still, I wouldn’t. Give me another fortune and I’ll squander it again. That’s what I realized today, suddenly dreaming of southern suns and the 300 year old missions they beat and maybe a desert. Longing for my own old photographs (where did they all go? Let’s find them!) and to shrug out from under this unbearable, smothering poise. To let loose these held tongues.

The long winter of this spring and summer and fall froze all my words. Maybe I needed to put them away awhile. But I heard this today: “the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses.” I thought of so much withheld, of cowardice in the name of peace. Of tracking down my words and regretting none of them.

I thought of quiet and its God damn, thank God expiration.

 Really love this. So much.

nypl:

housingworksbookstore:

A sectional view of the New York Public Library. (1911) (via NYPL Digital Gallery | Detail ID 805999)

We love this image, showing how the three public floors of the library are supported by the seven stories of stacks within.

Well… originally.

What most people don’t know is that our stacks now extend all the way underneath Bryant Park.

We don’t give tours of the stacks that often, but if you want to see more, you can check out this fantastic online tour (by way of blog post) by Kathie Coblentz, Rare Materials Cataloger for the library showing the inside look and the history of the stacks that make up the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

 So cool. On a seperate note… my brother bought me In the library perfume from I Hate Perfume for Christmas. It smells awesome… and if I close my eyes I can almost pretend I’m hanging out in these stacks, instead of sitting at my desk.