Björk and books

“There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you.” – Björk

all that no-one sees
you see
what’s inside of me
every nerve that hurts you heal
deep inside of me
you don’t have to speak – i feel
emotional landscapes
they puzzle me

Mindy Kaling’s book is available online

I don’t care if I’ve done two Mindy Kaling posts this week. I have made my peace with it and am comfortable in my Almost Famous-esque groupie shame, so everybody be cool.

The truth is, I would happily follow successful, funny writers around the country in a tour bus, were it a more practical stalking strategy.

Here is the link to her book.

Favourite quote so far: “Pancakes lead to lost weekends, like Trainspotting.”

Books with fabulous first lines

“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.”
- Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
- Catcher In the Rye, JD Salinger

“riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs.”
- Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

“Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.”
- The Debut, Anita Brookner

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”
- Herzog, Saul Bellow

“Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”
- The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace

“It was a pleasure to burn.”
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

“A screaming comes across the sky.”
- Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

“For a long time, I went to bed early.”
- Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.”
- Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
- Murphy, Samuel Beckett

“All this happened, more or less.”
- Slaughterhouse-Five,  Kurt Vonnegut

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
- The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
- Middlemarch, George Eliot

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.”
- City of Glass, Paul Auster

Roald Dahl teachings that became deeply ingrained, by way of Quentin Blake’s illustrations.

From the BFG - People with big ears are better at eavesdropping.

From Matilda - It is perfectly reasonable to spend a disproportionate time reading books.

From Matilda - Once you read lots of books, you become really clever, and once you become really clever, you become magic.

From Matilda - Everything will be better once you have a tall friend who carries you places in his ear.

From George's Marvellous Medicine - Household items, when mixed, will shoot an unwanted relative through the roof.

From The BFG - Cool people keep things in jars.

From George's Marvellous Medicine - Old ladies are the devil.

From The Twits - Fair play.

Karl Lagerfeld’s New Fragrance to Smell Like Books

The book-aholic has found the cure for everyone who misses the smell of paper in these digital times: a perfume that smells of books, thanks to a “fatty” olfactory mark.

 According to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Lagerfeld – who is known for his love of books and says he stocks more than 300,000 of them in his famous personal library – is already working on the fragrance with his publisher of choice, Steidl, which distributes most of the designer’s photography books.

FAZ reports that Paper Passion, which will be sold inside a hardcover book with the pages hollowed out to hold the flacon, will be developed with Berlin perfumer Geza Schön, who told the paper that “the fragrance will have a fatty note,” probably along the lines of linoleum, and that he was taking his inspiration from the smell of printed and unprinted paper.

For those who can’t wait until the perfume comes out, there are several paper-inspired fragrances already on the market, including Demeter’s Paperback, Zadig & Voltaire’s Tome 1, or Hammam Bouquet by Penhaligons.

By someone named Megan, not me.

Via the marvellous Book Lounge