Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Out of Print T-Shirts


So I just discovered this webstore called Out of Print that specializes in creating clothing and products that feature iconic book covers, and they have some of my favorites!!

This is their mission statement: "We work closely with artists, authors and publishers to license the content that ends up in our collections. Each product is treated to feel soft and worn like a well-read book. In addition to spreading the joy of reading through our tees and accessories, we acknowledge that many parts of the world don’t have access to books at all. We are working to change that. For each product sold, one book is donated to a community in need through our partner Books For Africa. How we read is changing as we move further into the digital age. It’s unclear what the role of the book cover will be in this new era, but we feel it’s more important than ever to reflect on our own individual experiences with great literary art before it’s forever changed."

What's your favorite?







Friday, July 25, 2014

Shakespeare Animation Short



I just stumbled across this amazing short animation by the Royal Shakespeare Company to go along with the plays they are performing. This video is from the project they did with a class of MA Character Animation students on Shakespeare's plays.

Do you enjoy Shakespeare? What's your favorite work by him? My favorite is hands down A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

"Wild" Movie Adaptation


So the trailer for the movie adaptation of Cheryl Strayed's book Wild just came out, and it is only serving to further ignite my interest in (and nebulous goals to accomplish) treks.

From Goodreads: "A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone. Strayed faces down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her."

What is your favorite book about surviving in the wild? 

Sunday, July 20, 2014

New Arrivals


June 16th - June 31st

http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9780805094619&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9780547959214&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9781423161639&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9780316222426&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9780385743372&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9781442466258&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9781442466302&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9780316322034&appid=4http://titlepeek.fsc.follett.com/tp/query?action=3&subnumber=1801210&isbn=9780062287014&appid=4

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

New Harry Potter Story



 In case you haven't heard, J.K. Rowling just released a new short story about Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermoine Granger, and others and their lives 30 years later. *squeeeeee! Have you read it yet?

It is composed as a newspaper column written by Rita Skeeter and takes place at a quidditch match. To read it, you have to have a Pottermore account. It is a really lovely read and though it leaves the reading wanting more (doesn't everything by Rowling though?) it is worth the rigamarole to sign up for a Pottermore account if you don't already have one. Check it out!

Monday, July 14, 2014

Teddy's Rules for Reading


I just stumbled across this neat article about the United States' 26th president, Teddy Roosevelt, and his rules for reading. Apparantly he was quite a voracious reader. I never knew! I thought I would re-list the rules here. What do you think? I love number 3.

1. “The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books… But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times.”

2. “A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.”
 
3. “Personally, the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.”

4. “The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.”

5. “He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.”
 
6. “Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls ‘the mad pride of intellectuality,’ taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.”

7. “Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.”

8. “Ours is in no sense a collector’s library. Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it. We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.”

9. “[We] all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.”
 
10. “Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.”

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

101 Recommendations for a College-Bound Reader


So, when I was in high school, I stumbled across the list of 101 Books for the College-Bound Reader. On the list were all the classics you would expect to find on a recommended literature list. But then there were a few that I had never heard of. (Who on earth is Chinua Achebe??) But either way I thought to try to read them all would be a good goal to have! Well, it is ten years since my high school graduation and I am have only read 36 of the 101. Have you read many of these?


Beowulf 
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart 
Agee, James - A Death in the Family 
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice 
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain 
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot 
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March 
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre 
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights 
Camus, Albert - The Stranger 
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop 
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales 
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard 
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening 
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness 
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans 
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage 
Dante - Inferno 
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote 
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe 
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities 
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment 
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy 
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers 
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss 
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays 
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying 
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury 
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby 
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier 
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust 
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies 
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter 
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms 
Homer - The Iliad 
Homer - The Odyssey 
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame 
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God 
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World 
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House 
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady 
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw 
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis 
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior 
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird 
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt 
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild 
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain 
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude 
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener 
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick 
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
 Morrison, Toni - Beloved 
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night 
Orwell, George - Animal Farm 
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago 
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar 
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales 
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way 
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front 
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac 
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep 
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye 
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet 
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth 
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream 
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet 
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion 
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein 
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony 
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 
Sophocles - Antigone 
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex 
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath 
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin 
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels 
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair 
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden 
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace 
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons 
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 
Voltaire - Candide 
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five 
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple 
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth 
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories 
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass 
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray 
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie 
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse 
Wright, Richard - Native Son
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