books – Grongar

Reading Challenge month 13 ~ A mystery or thriller

Hello. MM here, stepping in to write this month’s summary of the Reading Challenge.

This month’s selection was A Mystery or Thriller, perhaps partly because of our schedule: it was a dark and stormy end of the semester and finals were on the horizon, and H. is a happy and well-versed fan of Ngaio Marsh—in a pinch, she could fall back on that; and we’ve all read Doyle, one can always revisit Holmes. R also thought she might reopen the Case of Agatha Christie Books she loved way back in those murky dark trees closed together back there behind us at the vanishing point into the deep past, the creaky gate, the unknowable, uncertain almost certainly suspect and threatening, the vaguely sinister and definitely mysterious…1970’s.

But as it happened, fate held a different…fate… in store for us, when a seemingly innocent trip to the local book supermarket took a strange turn, just past Christian Romance Fiction, and led us, unsuspectingly and perhaps inevitably, to the subset of the Mystery section that was dedicated to… “Genre Mysteries”—shelves of whodunits involving cats, dogs, tea, antiques, what have you, whole series of mysteries related to particular special interests readers might have. We thought this sort of thing started and ended with the “The Cat Who…” series by Lilian Jackson Braun, from 20 or more years ago—but evidently Lilian was enough of a success that she’s spawned a subgenre, which I think we can all agree can only be called…copycat crimes.

Some are obviously tongue in cheek, others more serious. Most are potboilers (where does that term even come from), but evidently even those are divisible into two categories—one, books where people are trying to do their best, and shooting for literary merit or at least sales, doing the best they can do. Others are cranked out (that’s the only term that applies) by more “serious” writers looking for some fun or even an outlet for silliness, and maybe snap up some quick sales on the side while watching that Pulitzer Prize receding into a spinning vortex like the poster for Vertigo when you stared at it too hard.

What a discovery. What a lot of fun.

We’ll leave it up to you to discover the awful secret of which category _your_ pick falls into, should you venture into this section of your local Books A Million. Ours by the way still has the masking tape around it in the parking lot from where it dropped dead, as a Borders store, early one morning years ago, and don’t tell me nobody saw anything. West Lebanon is worse than Cannery Row: drugstores everywhere the cops can’t—or won’t— shut down; Supercuts is nothing but a clip joint, and I don’t want to know what Family Dollar does a dollar at a time to feed its kids. But nobody saw a thing when Borders went down. OK, if that’s the way you want to play it.

Anyway, our eventual lineup back at the station looked something like this:

“Rubbed Out – A Memphis BBQ Mystery”, by Riley Adams (Mine)
“Antiques Roadkill – A Trash-n-Treasures Mystery”, by Barbara Allen (H)
“Fillet of Murder: A Deep Fried Mystery”, by Linda Reilly (R)

And yes, as an added fillip, as if the authors (or publishers) were hedging their bets, these books all have recipes at the back, for some of the foods that show up over the course of the very mysterious journey they lead you on. Unsatisfied with whodunit? Maybe some pineapple casserole or bbq loaf will make you feel a little better, like that first shot of rotgut in the morning —just take it from me, and don’t use Mystery Meat, in either recipe.

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Did you read a mystery this month? We’d love to hear about it!

The category for the coming month is:

A book by a female author

We’ll reveal the next category somewhere around the middle of March.

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This post is part of our multi-year reading challenge. We’d love to have you join us for the whole challenge or any portion. Take a look at the checklist to see the current category (in green). We’ll announce the next category in the middle of next month.

Reading Challenge month 5 ~ A book that became a movie

Far From the Madding Crowd, page 1, paragraph 1. We meet Gabriel Oak and his broad smile: “the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.”

Bathsheba Everdene arrives in her “waggon” two pages later. Momentarily stopped, and believing she’s unobserved, she unwraps the looking-glass packed among the rest of her belongings, surveys herself, and smiles, and again the light arrives (recalling Gabriel’s rudimentary sketch?): “It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to scarlet glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright face and dark hair.”

Five pages later, Hardy is describing the light of the twinkling stars, the color of the stars, the “sovereign brilliancy of Sirius” that “pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red.”

It was around then I began to notice that, whatever the prominence of Gabriel, Bathsheba, Sargeant Troy, Mr. Boldwood, and the other human characters of Hardy’s tale, light is the true protagonist of Far From the Madding Crowd.

Once I started noticing it, light was everywhere. It streamed through a knot-hole in a folding door, “a dim light, yellow as saffron”. It rose and faded, appeared and disappeared, flapped “over the scene, as if it reflected from phosphorescent wings crossing the sky.” It shone pale-y, and brilliantly. It was scarlet and orange and yellow and white. It glittered and bristled, obscured and revealed. It cast shadows in strange places and illuminated where shadows normally are.

It came as sun light, moon light, star light, candle light, lantern light, fire light, hearth light, lightning.

At Gabriel’s lowest moment, when he realizes his entire flock of sheep—his livelihood, all he possesses—is lost over a cliff’s edge, he surveys the scene and Hardy describes not Oak’s posture, face, or feelings, but the light:

Over [an oval pond] hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon, which had only a few days to last—the morning star dogging her on the left hand. The pool glittered like a dead man’s eye, and as the world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a phosphoric streak upon the water. All of this Oak saw and remembered.”

Later, imminent tragedy (the loss of a season’s harvest) is averted when Gabriel notices “on his left hand an unusual light,” a glow that indicated that somewhere, not far away in that dark Wessex night, something was on fire.

Later still, June 1, sheep-shearing day and everyone who matters has gathered at The Great Barn to shear the sheep (oh, you must read at least the start of this chapter!). And then, when the work is done and they’ve all assembled at the long table for a celebration meal, the sun is going down, and it is “still the beaming time of evening…the western lines of light raking the earth without alighting upon it to any extent.” A gentle caress of light, a tender almost-touch as the light leaves the day: “the shearers’ lower parts becoming steeped in embrowning twilight, whilst their heads and shoulders were still enjoying the day, touched with a yellow of self-sustained brilliancy that seemed inherent rather than acquired.”

Can you read that and not picture the moment, feel the sun on your own shoulders, feel the tiredness and glow of day’s end when good work is behind you and the air is cooling?

Over and over, light kept stopping me. I no longer really cared what would happen to the other characters, though I assumed, this being Hardy, it would all end in tears.

Not so. I won’t spoil the ending for you if you haven’t read it, but this is an early Hardy novel. It ends with a glow, with a raised lantern whose “rays fell upon a group of male figures gathered upon the gravel in front, who…set up a loud ‘Hurrah!”

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As I write this, I’m sitting in a strange-to-me room and the light is strange, too. It’s coming in at angles I’m not used to, bouncing off of neighboring houses and in through unfamiliar windows. And it’s slithering over my hands as if to hold them, tug them, pull them away from the keyboard and out into the world.

But I can’t stop thinking of the light in Far From the Madding Crowd. The light fashioned by words alone, in paragraphs and broken lines. The light that sparkles on the ocean. The light filtering through the trees to the ferns on the forest floor. The light of headlights sweeping across the yard as the car pulls in to the driveway. The light flickering on a white screen in a darkened room. The light through venetian blinds, lying like glowing bars on a wooden floor.

The light of the morning. And the dimming of the day.

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Our books for month 5:

H ~ The Help, by Kathryn Stockett (movie trailer)
M ~ Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (PBS site and the New York Times review)
R ~ Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy (Roger Ebert’s review of the 1968 version; and Christy Lemire’s review of the 2015 version)

We’d love to know what you read this month. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

We’ll see you back here on July 11!

Reading Challenge month 4 ~ A book that came out the year you were born

In my grandparents’ house (if you didn’t count the steps leading to the veranda outside the front door), there were maybe 10 steps. They were slick, steep, linoleum-covered steps that led from the main floor down to the basement. There was a landing halfway down where you made a 90-degree turn. The steps were so steep and slippery that if you were wearing just socks and were in a hurry you were in danger of falling hard. Which I did more than once.

The basement at my grandparents house was full of mystery. For one thing, it was like a whole different house down there. I mean, another home. There was a bedroom and bathroom and laundry room and boiler room. And there was a huge room we called the “rec room” where there were beds against the walls and a tiny kitchen in the corner.

The rec room sometimes held a ping pong table and sometimes held a table top hockey game. Ping pong I understood (though never excelled at), but the hockey game was a mystery. How in the world did you know which lever controlled which hockey player, and how could you have enough hands to safely pass the plastic puck from one player to the other and into the goal? My uncles knew. They were hockey fiends. They played it in the street out front of the house during the afternoons and early evenings. They played it at the local ice rink. And they played it in the basement on the table top hockey game.

The kitchen in the rec room was especially fun for two little granddaughters on a summer afternoon. We could play house down there and pretend to cook. The kitchen—at the time—was a mystery, but I came to learn later that many houses on that street had the same setup: in times of financial need, you could take in boarders who would have their own entrance and kitchen.

The rec room also had a mystery door. On the far wall, covered with ancient portraits of stern looking family members, there was a door that was never opened. My sister and I stared at the door a lot and discussed what might be behind it, but we never saw anyone else open it or come through it.

One otherwise boring afternoon I got brave, with all my black-and-white ancestors looking on, and I opened the door just a couple inches. Behind it was another door. The very presence of that second door terrified me, and I slammed the first door hard.

It was years later when I learned the solution to that mystery: a cold cellar. The very thing I wish we had in this house.

There was a cupboard under those slippery stairs and, on another long afternoon when I was exploring the secrets of this house I loved, I opened the cupboard door. Inside, I found several pairs of crutches (I imagine that three hockey playing uncles probably needed crutches more than once) and a shelf with several volumes of Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew mysteries.

Our summers never lacked for books. We went to the library every week and came home with armloads of books, but there weren’t that many books that lived in the house on a permanent basis. This small collection was a surprise and another mystery. Who had read them before? My mother and my uncles, I supposed.

I’d never read a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boy mystery before. I pulled out dusty bluish hard covered volume called “The Mystery of the 99 Steps,” crept up the stairs, and lay down on the bed.

The summer afternoon slowly melted away while Nancy solved all of her mysteries. The sun fizzled out behind the back yard and the street lights out front came on. At night, the street was quiet and the curbs were borders for unknown countries. My sister and sat out on the verandah, our thighs sticking to the plastic chairs, cool bowls of chocolate ice cream in our hands, moths dancing around the lights. And we knew everything. Absolutely everything.

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Our books for month 4:

H ~ I wish Someone Were Waiting for me Somewhere, by Anna Gavalda
M ~ Cider With Rosie, by Laurie Lee
R ~ The Mystery of the 99 Steps, by Carolyn Keene

We’d love to know what you read this month. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

I’m a couple days late posting this, so let’s bump the due date out a bit. We’ll see you back here on June 11!

Reading Challenge month 3 – A classic romance

When H chose this category last month, the image that immediately came to my mind was that rack of pink-covered Harlequin Romances at the book store when I was a kid.

That rack that I passed with barely a glance on my way to the brown clad books: dogs, horses, reference.

In fact, I went in search of that rack for a picture for this post and you know what I found? Fifty shades of grey. Quite literally. To be sure, there’s still a scattering of covers dressed in pinks and purples depicting clutching couples, shirtless men, and gowned damsels in distress. But most of the romance covers are unlike those of my dusty pink memory. They’re blue and black and grey, with motorcycles and vampires and empty landscapes. Old houses, space ships, jewels, and, of course, blindfolds.

And still, between the covers, it’s almost always that same long-told, reassuring story: one meets another, there’s the spark (love, hate, disdain, attraction), there’s the longing and the eventual coming to terms, there’s the obstruction (cruel step mother, overseas job, old girlfriend, different species, different planet), there’s the long montage of return to each other. And then there’s the ending… together or apart, with some hope that there will be love at some point, if only in a different time and place.

For this challenge, all I really wanted to do was read my favorite Jane Austen (Persuasion), which has all of the above elements in abundance, plus (to my mind) a heroine who truly deserves the happiness she attains at the end. Instead, I read a more recent classic: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles.

It was fine. It had most of the elements. It had Sarah in her dark cloak at the end of the Cobb being buffeted by the wind and waves (the Cobb, in fact, makes an appearance in Persuasion). But it was no Persuasion. And now I’ve learned that the crucial element (for me) is the ending: Elizabeth and Darcy must end up in incandescent happiness. Anne and Frederick must end up on the deck of his ship, setting out for adventure.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

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Our books for month 3:

H ~ The Annotated Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen
M ~ Waterland, by Graham Swift
R ~ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles

We’d love to know what you read this month. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

If you need help finding a book, here are some good resources (note, however, that just because a book was popular or best selling in a particular year doesn’t mean it was necessarily first published in that year; check the information for the particular book you want to read):

Best Selling books of the 20th Century, listed by year
Goodreads “Most Popular By Year” search (select the year you want in the “by year” box at the top of the right-hand column)
Wikipedia Books by Year search

We’ll see you back here on May 9!

Reading Challenge month 2 – A book you started but never finished

[Ed note: This month’s post is brought to you by M, one of my favorite guest bloggers.]

There’s a book I’ve been trying to read for over half my life, and by that I don’t mean a book I’ve always meant to get to but haven’t yet (that would be the Brothers Karamazov), or a book I’ve occasionally thought about getting to but maybe never will (Stephen King’s IT), or even a particular title from the list of books we’re all supposed to have read at some point or another (too many to count).

Instead I mean a book I’ve picked up and plowed into with the best intentions, time and again, only to spectacularly and convincingly fail to make any headway with, every time. My sister Anne gave me this book for Christmas or a birthday, probably around 1980, or 1982. I think she found it on the shelves of a bookseller friend of hers in Ann Arbor, but that was long ago and I may be way off. Certainly it was the sort of book you’d have expected to find in a used bookstore in Ann Arbor, then and now. It wasn’t Borders, by the way, but Borders was there then, just the one shop (that’s how long I’ve been trying to read this book: Empires have risen and fallen).

The book was called – is called – “Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts”, and was compiled and edited by a man named James J. Murphy who in the interval between my being given the book and the present has become Googleable, though back then he and his book seemed beyond arcane, and that seemed right up my alley: fairly short (235 pp) and made up of modern English translations of three early medieval prescriptive essays on Letter Writing, Composing Latin Poetry, and Sermonizing. It seemed like an important book to have, and to read.

Unfortunately, the book put me to sleep. Repeatedly and predictably, once or twice every year or so for 30-odd years. It was always on a shelf in plain sight – no forgetting it or shoving it away in a spare bedroom — but on some long winter afternoon or a slow summer evening — sitting up or lying down, quiet or with music playing, indoors or out — I’d pick it up and have a go: zzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZ, and always in the first few pages of the first essay, or even somewhere in the short introduction. It was fairly ridiculous; sometimes it bothered me, sometimes it didn’t. But the pattern never changed.

I packed the book up and moved it eight times. It survived the periodic book purges between then and now because it was on that short list of items you’d feel not quite like yourself if you got rid of it — like some small but irremediable change had occurred. But only if I eventually managed at some point to read the thing at least once– never getting to it would have been just depressing.

All of which means that when we started this project and I saw this category listed I thought Oho!, and it doesn’t surprise me that this is the first category I chose.

And hey guess what, I read it. Finally it was easy, and not because I’d given myself a deadline (I’d tried that one before). Or because I thought “OK, if I can only average 10 or so pages a day for a month, that’ll do it” (I’d tried that angle before, too, along with “You don’t have to even enjoy it, just read the book and then tell yourself you did it.”)

What finally worked, oddly, was concentrating on it. I told myself I wasn’t going to skim, I wasn’t going to let my mind wander as i glazed past a paragraph and say that counted. I used a highlighter and a pen, read slowly, took notes, and stopped to think about what I was reading or to look something up. It turned out easy that way, and the book paid me back, as they usually will– I learned a ton of stuff, a lot of which I’d have been happy to have known 20 or more years ago. I laughed a few times. There were interesting connections to works I already knew, and generally it was a light shining into corners I’d spent a lot of good times in long, long, ago. I’m happy to have finished it: introduction, appendices and all.

Highly Recommended for Students of Early Medieval Epistolary, Prosodic, or Homiletic writing, for the General Reader interested in a challenge, or for anyone who likes a good long nap.

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Our books for month 2:

H ~ The Annotated Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
M ~ Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, by James J. Murphy
R ~ The Waves, by Virginia Woolf

We’d love to know what you read this month. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

We’ll see you back here on April 9!

Reading Challenge month 1 – A book set in a different country

In 1956, Gavin Maxwell was traveling in southern Iraq when it occurred to him that he would like to own an otter (his beloved dog had recently died). Though he had a flat in London and traveled widely, he also had tenancy of a remote house in Sandaig, on the western coast of Scotland, and he thought an otter would live a happy life there, encircled by the ring of bright water.

He knew nothing of raising an otter, and the first one he adopted died after a short time in his care, before they even made it back to Scotland. And then he found Mijbil. The first encounters are delightful, with Mij curling up with Maxwell in a sleeping bag for the night. Maxwell describes Mij’s antics in the London flat, his affectionate and curious behavior, as well as his destructive tendancies. We see Mij in harness and leash, being walked on London streets, or playing with toys or in the bath.

Soon after, they travel up to Scotland and Mij is slowly given freedom to explore the land and water around the house: an otter’s paradise of streams, waterfalls, ocean, and fish. It’s all as sweet as a fairy tale.

But we know that all fairy tales have dark underpinnings, and so goes the story of Maxwell and his otters. Because, of course, otters are wild animals and, though darling and affectionate when young, they grow up to be adult wild animals, who have sharp teeth and claws, and unpredictable natures.

The first book in the trilogy, Ring of Bright Water, describes the best, most hopeful years of the endeavor. Other otters are adopted. And Greylag geese. Maxwell furnishes and renovates the previously empty house. He buys and renovates a boat. He marries (briefly). He has friends come to help care for the growing menagerie. He writes. And he writes beautifully.

One of my favorite passages is from early in the book, about the elver migration he witnesses at Sandaig, and another is his description of his neighbor’s children and their encounter with a rush of herring fry in the bay:

The sun was very low; the shadow of the house lay long and dark across the grass and the rushes, while the hillside above glowed golden as though seen through orange lenses. The bracken no longer looked green nor the heather purple; all that gave back their own colour to the sun were tge scarlet rowanberries, as vivid as venous blood. When I turned to the sea it was so pale and polished that the figures of the twins thigh-deep in the shadows showed in almost pure silhouette against it, bronze-coloured limbs and torsos edged with yellow light. They were shouting and laughing and dancing and scooping up the water with their hands, and all the time as they moved there shot up from the surface where they broke it a glittering spray of small gold and silver fish, so dense and brilliant as to blur the outline of the childish figures. It was as though the boys were the central decor of a strangely lit baroque fountain, and when they bent to the surface with cupped hands a new jet of sparks flew upward where their arms submerged, and fell back in brittle, dazzling cascade.

Alone, that passage is beautifully evocative, but it’s the next part that I can’t forget:

Then I saw that a hundred yards out on the surface was ruffled by flurries of mackerel whose darting shoals made a sputter of spray on the smooth swell of the incoming tide. The mackerel had driven the fry headlong before them into the narrow bay and held them there, but now the pursuers too were unable to go back. They were in turn harried from seaward by a school of porpoises who cruised the outermost limits of their shoal, driving them father and farther towards the shore. Hunter and hunted pushed the herring soil [fry] ever inward to the sand…Beyond them, black against the blanched sunset water, rose the towering sabre fin of a bull killer whale, the ultimate enemy of sea creatures great and small, the unattackable; his single terrible form controlling by its mere presence the billion of lives between himself and the shore.

The layers on layers, the way each each action has a reaction, the way one thing leads to an inevitable other. The story of “Ring of Bright Water” ends on a hopeful note. The next two books in the trilogy tell of sadness and disaster heaped on disaster, but I still can’t forget the golden early days when even a mad idea seemed like a good idea.

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Our books for month 1:

H ~ The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, by Catherynne M. Valente
M ~ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, by Dylan Thomas
R ~ The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy, by Gavin Maxwell

We’d love to know what you read. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

We’ll see you back here on March 9!

All you gotta do to join…

I’ve heard from many of you dear people since I first posted about the Reading Challenge–and it looks like we have an Organization* (if not a Movement).

We’re so excited you’re joining us!

Here’s a brief recap of the plan:

We’ll pick a new book category on the 9th of each month (for example, January 9).
You read any book you want, as long as it falls somehow into the category. It can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, an essay, children’s literature, something a friend wrote, whatever you fancy.
On the 9th of the next month (for example, February 9), I’ll post here to tell you what M and H and I read. In that same post, we’ll announce the next month’s category. Feel free to comment on that post to tell us what you read. You can include a link to your own blog post, just give us a title, write a review, link to a photo of the cover, or do nothing at all. It’s all up to you!

To help us keep track of our progress, I’ll update the checklist every month. Green indicates the currently selected category. You can find the checklist anytime you want by clicking the “Reading Challenge” link in the menu bar above.

See you on February 9!

*Surely you know “Alice’s Restaurant.”

What are you doing for the next few years?

We’re reading.

Well, yeah, we’re always reading, but H told me about this 2015 Reading Challenge and it looked like fun, except I didn’t really want the pressure of reading an assigned book a week (even a self-assigned one) since I already have a big pile of books I want to read. The last thing I want to do is add more pressure to my life, or anyone else’s.

So, instead, we’re going to take it nice and slow, and read one book a month. By my reckoning, we’ll be finishing this challenge in 2019. H will be in college.

Eek.

Maybe I shouldn’t have done the math.

Anyway. This particular challenge is by category, not specific title. For instance, it asks you to read a book a friend recommended, or a memoir, or a book based on a true story. This gives you a lot of leeway in choosing a book — you can read anything that strikes your fancy as long as it fits somehow into the category.

(Notice how I slipped the word “you” into that last sentence?)

Want to join us?

Here’s how it’s going to work:

We’ll pick a new category on the 9th of every month. Why? Because. That’s why. (Also, I didn’t get my act together until today, so today’s as good a day to start as any.)

For the first month, I’ll choose the category (the challenge is a checklist, not a numbered list, so we’re going to attack in the order that pleases us). Then we all select a book that fits in that category and read it.

At the next 9th, I’ll post our selections here, our thoughts on what we read (if we have any), and the category for the next month (M will choose the category for the second month, H for the third, then back to me for the fourth, and so on).

If you’re joining us, you can use the category we choose, or choose your own. You can go faster or slower than we do. You can comment here to tell us what you’re reading or what you thought of your book, or you can just be a lurker.

It’s a no pressure book club.

But I’d really love it if you’d join us. How much fun would it be to talk about books together?

C’mon. Pleeeeze?

Okay, even if you don’t want to, WE are going to, and you can read about it here.

The first category is………

A book set in a different country

Now, let’s get reading!

One step: 52 weeks

One little step to help me march through the year.

I’ve joined the LensProToGo 52 Week Photo Project where we’re given a photo assignment each week. This week’s assignment (due today) is to take a self portrait of yourself without you in it.

Hmmm.

My first thought was, “What?! I have no idea what to take a picture of!”

My second thought was a picture of my disaster of an office. But that would just be too shocking as my first entry.

My third thought was a picture of scattered somethings (seeds? toys? thoughts?) on the floor, and I still sort of like that idea.

Then I saw my bedside stack of to-be-read books and figured if anything represents me, that would pretty much sum it up: a love of words, a pile too big to handle easily, and a selection too eclectic to describe in one sentence.

When I downloaded my photos from my camera, this photo was rotated by 90º, and I liked it. M and I discovered that if we flipped it over 180º, even though it’s still on its side, it didn’t look anywhere as interesting. Something about the words on the spines being oriented the “wrong way” (for those of us in North America, anyway, used to reading book spines from top to bottom) made it look as if the books were floating.

Well… I’m a beginner and this sort of serendipty made me smile. I’ll take that.

The Project participants are posting their pictures to the Project Flickr page by the Sunday of each week; go check it out; there are some really amazing photos there. I’ll try to post mine here each week, too.

Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left.