Tag Archives: books

Things Napoleon Said and Award Censorship

May I share some quotes and marginalia from my old quotation book with you today?

Cervantes said in Don Quixote, “There are no proverbial sayings which are not true.”

To say, “a man has an axe to grind,” first appeared in print in “Essays from The Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe” by Charles Miner, published in 1811 in the Wilkesbarre Gleaner, a Pennsylvania newspaper.

Another phrase, that sounds out of fashion to me, is “to mix with brains.” English portrait painter John Opie was asked what he mixed his colors with. He answered, “I mix them with my brains, sir.”

During a debate, when one of Phocian the Good’s (402-320 BC) statements stirred up applause of the audience, he asked a nearby friend, “Have I inadvertently said some evil thing?”

Napoleon (1769-1821) has these words attributed to him (without sources):

“Imagination rules the world.”
“I made all my generals out of mud.”
“There are two levers for moving men–interest and fear.”
“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
“Independence, like honor, is a rocky island without a beach.”

Greek general Aristides (530-468 BC) said, “The Athenians will not sell their liberties for all the gold either above or under ground.”

And, finally, the Stoics had this proverb, according to Plutarch: “The good man only is free; all bad men are slaves.”

Do all of those right true? They aren’t all proverbial, so we could cut them a bit of slack. What else do we have?

Volcanos: Seven years after Vesuvius erupted, a Jesuit priest climbed it to make his observations. “I thought I beheld the habitation of hell.”

Books: Simon Leys asked, “Are books essentially useless?” Well, they aren’t food.

Sci-Fi Award Censorship: The Hugo Awards are being held in China this year and some notable works were declared ineligible without explanation. Authors conjecture the Chinese government is to blame. Two members of the nomination board have resigned in response.

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Word Games, Moscow, and the Secret Life of a Librarian

I may have just found a book I must read this year.

Joel Miller asks, “If you lived in a society that was strictly and officially materialist in which the state and its officers vetoed disagreement, what would you do if you still recognized the transcendent and dissented from the party line?”

One option would be to “write a surrealist satire that mocked the materialists and dropped the devil and his entourage in Moscow to bend the party line well past breaking.”

That’s what Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov did in his posthumously published work The Master and Margarita (1970). Miller explains one of the author’s themes this way. “For all their anti-capitalistic propaganda, Muscovites were every bit as covetous and grasping as anyone, maybe worse. And as far as the Soviet insistence on strict atheism, Bulgakov replies: Fine, if you won’t have God, you can have the devil—and the devil will have you.”

Word Games: Merrium-Webster shelled out an undisclosed 7-figure amount to purchase Quordle, the word-guessing game that gives you four target words at once. I played many times last year and have gotten away from it for a while. Returning to it this week has not been easy. I want to blame Wordle’s hard mode. You can’t guess four words at once while using all your current hints. Maybe the dictionary has placed harder words.

Quordle is a different challenge than Daily Sectordle, which gives you 32 words at once.

Are word games actually good for your brain? If it’s a challenge, if you aren’t running through them on auto pilot, then yes.

Librarian: There’s a novelization of Belle da Costa Greene, the woman who built J. P. Morgan’s personal library, by Alexandra Lapierre. Gina Dalfonzo writes, “Lapierre is the kind of writer who can make a rare book auction into a thrilling action scene, and make a reader yearn to hold a copy of the bejeweled 8th-century Lindau Gospels. She gets you so caught up in Belle’s untiring passion for her work, it tears at your heart to think that Belle would have been barred from that work if her heritage had been known.”

Finding a Good Home for Books: Steve Donoghue says being a “book person” tends to attract orphan books. “I’m talking about squalling little orphans furtively deposited at the back door of the rectory by tearful (or grateful) parents who have decided that their babies will have a better chance for happiness if cast onto the mercy of a rude stream than if they stay neglected and underfed at home.”

Apocalypse Next Door: Russian sci-fi novelist Dmitry Glukhovsky says his apocalyptic novel set in the Moscow metro system is selling well after his government condemned him for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Coffee: At least among customers of Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, iced coffee has overtaken hot coffee orders by three to one. Next month, Starbucks is changing its rewards program to make getting free hot coffee or tea 100 stars (not 50) and free iced coffee or tea 100 stars (not 150). Fans are upset, maybe because handcrafted drinks cost 50 stars more, maybe because change of any kind upsets people.

Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash

Strange Things Found in Books

I have found a few casually interesting things in books over the years: old newspaper ads or a library card. Notes written in the margins have been the most engaging thing I’ve found. In fact, I have my mother’s Bible with many marginal notes. (She passed away two years ago this month.) One of these notes marks Isaiah 41:9-10 as my Dad’s verse.

Laurie Hartzel of the Star-Tribune collected reader submissions for strange things they have found in books, including a vintage postcard, a banana peel, and a diamond ring.

Do Celebrity Book Clubs Sell Books?

Reese Whitherspoon has taken up the challenge of recommending books to fans and followers. Vox says it is an extension of her personal image. “Witherspoon’s star image is based on the idea of Witherspoon as smart and driven and bookish — in a funny way, a likable way.”

Some of her selections have sold hundreds of thousands, which is very exciting for those select authors; but this article has a remarkable detail about the book industry as a whole. It says that with 300,000+ new titles published in the US every year and 2,200,000+ published worldwide, readers want to get recommendations from celebrities they trust.

But here’s the shocker. Though sales of selected books soared when Oprah picked them, the overall sale of books that year stayed within expectations. “Exactly as many people bought books as were already going to buy books.” More readers are reading certain books, but apparently more people are not reading. Or at least they are not buying books to read.

In 2018, Pew Research reported that three out of four Americans read one book in any format last month, and that rate has been steady since 2012.

The snows of April

Shoveling snow
Photo credit: Filip Mroz

If you’ve had your head oriented in the right direction today, you probably caught the sound of Midwesterners bewailing yesterday’s snow storm. These April storms, though hardly unprecedented, always seem (as T. S. Eliot noted) “cruel.” The vernal equinox passes. Easter has been celebrated. Now what’s left of the snow is supposed to decently fade away, like old soldiers. Instead we got a nice big container load of it, and the drive to work this morning was a white-knuckler (coming home was fine. The April sun was strong enough to clear the streets and dry them off too).

But I looked at it all, and I thought of my ancestors (you do that when you have no offspring, I guess). And I thought, “A spring like this might have meant starvation to those folks. By this time of year those old peasants had nearly eaten through their stored winter food. The dried cod was running low, the flatbread was moldy and mouse-nibbled, the barley porridge was getting to be more water than meal. If you couldn’t hunt something or catch some fish soon, the pickings would be lean. You might have to eat the seed grain, or slaughter one of the pigs you’d planned to breed.

So I really haven’t got any cause to complain. My food problem is eating too much of it. Continue reading The snows of April

The Window Says Welcome, but the Door Says Closed

Family Christian Stores are closing. The company president said they could not compete in today’s market.

B&N sales are slumping. They report having success with educational toys and games, but still need to grow sales in general. The CEO says they are testing many ideas and some newly designed stores are working well. “He said B&N is ‘on the eve’ of developing a new prototype store ‘that we think will carry us well into the future,'” reports Publishers Weekly.

What do you think about the physical bookstores? Are they yesterday’s shopping venue? Will they go the way of Woolworth? What would you like to see in a local bookstore that would attract your business?

My only thought is that if a company like B&N could gain the reputation (reality aside) of having the book you want when you want it, readers would run to that. That may be too much. Perhaps making the shopping process as easy as walking through the store with your smart phone, but complications will always abound there.

But those are big store ideas. Blue Bunny Books in Dedham, Massachusetts, hopes its unique personal touch will sustain it in the shadow of a brick-and-mortar Amazon store. Its customers seem to think so.

The Library Wine List

Are these meant to be recommendations for librarians who wish to sell wine or library patrons who might want to drink something while reading their latest selection? [seen on Books, Inc.]
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Why Do We Read Literature?

As a partial response to a suggestion from searider a few weeks ago, I ask you, a reader gracious (or perhaps unfortunate) enough to glance at this humble blog, why do you read literature? Why do you read good fiction as opposed to cheap or pulp fiction or non-fiction?
Here’s an answer from Proverbs 25:11-13.

A word fitly spoken
is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.
Like a gold ring or an ornament of gold
is a wise reprover to a listening ear.
Like the cold of snow in the time of harvest
is a faithful messenger to those who send him;
he refreshes the soul of his masters.