Vintage Alice

The original book cover of the 1898 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The character, Alice, is widely assumed to be based on the daughter of a family friend of Carroll's, Alice Liddell.

{Photo of Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll, 1858}

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll

K.

Images via Wikipedia

Home is Where the Books Live

Daily Aesthetic Fix

Since we are on the topic of books today - here are photos that I found over at Mirage Bookmark of some of the world's most beautiful bookstores.

Wouldn't you just love to get lost in one of these for a day... or days?!

Shakespeare & Co. Antiquarian Books, Paris
(To view a really great virtual tour of this quaint bookstore click here)

Bookstore in El Ateneo in Buenos Aires - previously a theatre

Lello bookstore in Porto, Portugal - open since 1906

Selexyz Bookstore in Maastricht, Holland - A converted church with its coffee shop placed at the altar

Images via Mirage Bookmark via individual photographers on Flickr

i HEART books

I was reading up a storm over the holidays - one of my very favourite things to do!

I lurve books ;) I love the feel of them, the smell of them, the look of the type on the pages and the art on the covers. And of course, I love the magic within them.

What I also love is spending hours browsing through bookstores and deciding what will be my next read.

I've found 3 really great online sites to help make that decision even easier:

What Should I Read Next?

The Book Seer

weRead

Continue reading for a breakdown of each...

Here you can enter a book you like and the site will analyse its database of real readers' favourite books (over 65,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next.

For example, without having to sign up to anything, I typed in The Great Gatsby (one of my all time faves) and based on other users' booklists that have read Gatsby the following recommendations were listed:

This Side of Paradise - F.Scott Fitzgerald

A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams

The Beautiful and Damned - F.Scott Fitzgerald
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance - Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

If you sign up by entering your email address you then have the ability to start building your own booklist of favourite reads at which point you can cross reference your list with other users who have similar lists to see what books they have read that you may be interested in as well.

Critique

What Should I Read Next? seems to have a few bugs at the moment though so if you get an error message with your search check your spelling and try again.

Also, it would be beneficial if reviews could be written and reviewed and titles could be organized based on genre, tags, and other similarities.

However, it was fun building my booklist to keep track of what I've read and it's interesting to compare mine to others that have similar reading tastes.

The Book Seer

Here you can type in a book title and it's author and it will bring up a list of similar titles recommended by Amazon, LibraryThing, and BookArmy.

The opening page is very simple and you just write in the title and author of a book you enjoyed. I just finished reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg and really loved it so that is the example I used.

Some of the recommended books that were retreived were other Fannie Flagg novels as well as:

Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies by Laura Esquivel
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story by John Berendt
Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver
Where the Heart is (Oprah's Book Club) by Billie Letts

I have read some of the above books and it seems that the results have come back based on novels set in the South as Fried Green Tomatoes is. Others, such as Pigs in Heaven and Where The Heart Is also have a similar style of light-hearted prose.

Critique

This site is extremely useful if you've found an author or book you love and are simply looking for similar reads.

The recommendations from Amazon tend to just be other works written by the same author - a simple Google search could get the same results. However, the results retreived by LibraryThing are excellent. As shown above, Fried Green Tomatoes retreived either other southern tales or light-hearted reads with kooky characters.

weRead

You can access weRead through it's site here or use it as an application through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

There is a ton of things you can do on weRead! You can build your bookslists and share them with friends, list books you are currently reading and want to read, rate books, list your favourite authors, read and write reviews, get book recommendations, etc.

Trust me, HOURS can be spent on this! LOL The greatest thing about it is that you can then share your bookshelf with your friends on social networking sites as I do on Facebook.

Critique

weRead can be slow in loading sometimes but other than that it's great!

Another great feature of weRead is that you can add a widget to your blog to display some of your bookshelf!

So, without further ado... I give you my bookshelf!

Powered by weRead

Happy Reading!!

K.

"Reading" Paintings by Renoir

Daydream: A cozy home library

As I've mentioned before here, I am determined to someday have a house with a whole room dedicated to being a home library. It will be stacked full of beautiful, delicious books with floor to ceiling shelves and big comfy chairs to curl up in. There will be a bay window with plush cushions to sit on. There will also be a roaring fireplace for the chilly months. I will spend hours upon hours surrounded by pages containing adventure, love, mystery, beauty, and knowledge.

This is my daydream...

What would you do to have a library like this in your home? What would you do to have a home big enough to fit a library like this?!

I love how these 2-storey shelves draw the eye all the way up to the ceiling.

I LOVE this room - it's so bright and airy. I could read in here all day long...

An attic loft is a great space to have a library - Attics have an aura of mystery and adventure just like within pages of these books.

Someday I will need a ladder to reach the very top shelves of my library as well ;)

On second thought, forget the ladder! I want a circular staircase!

Gorgeous built-ins!

This is definitely my favourite! So cozy and eclectic! I'm sure it has a big bay window somewhere and a fireplace too ;)

Such a beautiful reading nook!

How fun is this?! A tee-peed reading nook!

I really like how they opened up this closet space to make room for shelves.

I thought this shelving idea was interesting. It's made from a bunch of tables stacked on top of each other.

A funky idea for the DIYer!

This is a staircase made of bookshelves! How cool is this?!

I like these diagonal shelves. They would be great in a modern room or mixed in with traditional shelves for a more eclectic look.

This is creative! Would be great in a school library or in a household with children.

Ahh... to dream... Someday it will be mine! LOL
And apparently I'm not the only one who would love a home library. According to the Telegraph there are more people who want libraries in their home than cinemas, gyms, or music studios!

For all of you Book, Library, and Sex and the City fans out there I just had to end this post with the famous scene between Carrie and Big from the SATC movie:

Carrie slides over and nestles in, leaning up against him. She opens her book.
He looks down at it.
BIG: Are you the last person in New York still taking out library books?
CARRIE: I love the smell.
She smells the book, then holds it up to him. He smells.
BIG: That's an old one!




K.



Images via: It's Rather Bipolar, Cote de Texas, Domino, ElmoFromOK, Eva Designs, Remodeling Center, Bookshelf, The Reader Online

Book lists, Book lists, Book lists!

All-Things-Creative Wednesdays

Books are magical. Books allow for one to become completely and utterly immersed in other worlds and other lives like no movie, tv show, or video game can.

I love the smell of them, I love the feel of them, I love the sound of the pages when they're ruffled.

My own collection has built up over the past years as I'm determined to someday have a house with a room dedicated to all the books I will have acquired (aka a library!)

If I had to list all my favourites, I could probably come up with about a 100 like the lists below... but I'm not going to pretend to be a book critic!

However a few that I absolutely LOVE and that come to mind right away I would recommend are:

* Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald
* Boy's Life, Robert McCammon
* The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

* The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy

* Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
* I Know This Much is True, Wally Lamb

And for those of you who enjoy a little chick lit once in a while, full of delicious glamour, drama and scandal, I just have 3 things to say to you:

Penny Vincenzi! Penny Vincenzi! Penny Vincenzi!

Not to worry though; I have also scoured the internet for a decent list of must-reads from the "experts" and have come up with a few (because I wasn't quite satisfied with any one of them).

Here is the All-Time 100 Novels list from TIME Magazine. It's good because it is the most up to date list I could find (2008) and the original TIME review is linked to each title. However, the list is only of novels written from 1923 onwards. (1923 is the year TIME Magazine began).

Here is the 100 Best Novels list from the Modern Library. It's a good list for the inclusion of classics and other 20th century novels, but it was completed in 1998 - so it doesn't include the incredible books that have been written in the last decade.

Last but not least, here is the Oprah's Book Club list. A lot may scoff at Oprah for various reasons, but there is no doubt that the majority of novels that have been chosen for her book club have been great reads.

Between these 3 lists you will most definitely be prepared for your next trip to the library or bookstore!

Shamefully, I've only read 15 from the TIME list and even less from the Modern Library list... (a lot of my reading hours during youth were spent with the mystery and thriller genres). But thankfully I do have quite a few of them just waiting for me on my shelves at home :)

How many have you read? Feel free to leave your comments...

Happy reading :)

K

Above book cover images, in order of appearance, via Random House, Simon & Shuster, Penguin Classics, Pat Conroy, Penguin Classics, Harper Collins. Above home library image via ElmoFromOK