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

Daily Aesthetic Fix: Vintage Christmas

Everything Vintage: Santa Claus

Vintage Friday

I just love Christmas and I adore images of Santa. Such a jolly, round little fellow! Here are some vintage Christmas images I found...



Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

This is my favourite! I just love the Coca Cola Santa!

Below images via Itkupilli Shop

!!Have a wonderful weekend!!

I'm Dreaming of a Pink Christmas

Daydream: Pink Girly-Girl Christmas

Christmas is near and my house is full of holiday cheer with traditional Christmas decor and traditional carols playing softly in the background (none of this Britney Spears make-up-my-own-xmas-carols-crap!)

However, even though our house is decorated in red, green, gold, and silver, I am much more open to contemporary Christmas decor than I am to contemporary Christmas carols!

For instance, wouldn't it be just darling to have a home decorated in pink for the holidays? Even more, wouldn't it be beautiful in the girly dream home I featured here in all it's pink decor delight? LOL

This was my letter to Santa Claus this year:

Dear Santa,
Please make my boyfriend colour blind for the holidays so he will not notice if the house is decorated from top to bottom in pink.

That's all.

K.

If my wish came true (which it did not, in case you were wondering) this is what I would do:

I would drape my pink door with fuzzy white boas....

I would display pretty pink ornaments on my mantel and drape some more fuzzy white boas...

I would hang pink stockings in anticipation of Santa filling them with sugar plums and pink candy...

I'm dreaming of a PINK Christmas

Just like the ones I used to know

Where the treetops glisten, and children listen

To hear sleigh bells in the snow

I'm dreaming of a PINK Christmas

With every Christmas card I write

May your days be merry and bright

And may all your Christmases be PINK!

All my Christmas trinkets would be pretty and dainty...

I would have pink, glittery bulbs hanging from all my white, crystal chandeliers...

Ornaments would be soft, pink, and feathery...

Where possible, everything would be hung by silky, pink ribbon....

Gifts would be wrapped in pretty pink paper and adorned with pretty pink bows and stars, and bulbs....

I would wish you a Merry Christmas in pink, pink, pink....

I would sit with my fellow girly girls and make pink Christmas crafts while sipping pink champagne and eating pink marshmallowy desserts...

To make the above pink superstar snowflakes:

* Cut small snowflakes from folded paper, using the same technique you learned in grade school.
*Add shimmer with spray glitter and attach a tinsel ornament to the center.
*Hot-glue the snowflakes to purchased silver stars.
*Use one as a tree topper or group them as ornaments to hang on the tree or from a chandelier.

Tell me, what is your Christmas decor style?
What did you ask Santa for this year?

K.

Images via bhg