We saw this great fence when we were driving around upstate New York. Love it! Elsewhere: bookplates, Meet Your Printmaker, and I’m adding Alphabet City to my wishlist.

Getting unexpected mail is the best thing. A new review book from Princeton Architectural Press arrived yesterday, and by 8pm last night, both Shawn and I had each finished reading it (and were talking about how much we liked it.)

You may already know of her, Kate T. Williamson, for her beautifully illustrated book A Year in Japan. This time, in her newest book, At A Crossroads, she tells us of what happened after Japan, when she moved home to live with her parents in Pennsylvania while “working on a book.”

I alternated between cringing and laughing out loud, as she recreates the awkward moments, the mundane moments, the outrageous, and even the sad and quiet ones with amazing honesty. Her stylized illustrations and witty writing cast light on the little things which make life precious: getting her grandmother to trim her crooked haircut, the squirrel glaring at her after she evicts the family from outside her window, watching her dad’s barbershop chorus perform at a quartet competition, and (one of my favorites) just walking the family dog.

There aren’t any grand ephiphanies or lessons here. We just see the things she encountered during the 23 months she lived at her parent’s house, while being “at a crossroads.” I think that’s where the honesty lies. And what makes this book so worth reading.

Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums, edited by Barbara Levine and Kirsten M. Jensen,  is the compilation of diaries, stories, scrapbooks, and photographs by travelers who roamed the globe in the early 1900s, meticulously recording their adventures with brownie cameras, calligraphy pens, and collections of ship menus, newspaper clippings, and souvenir postcards. Page after page of vintage photography and lettering, this is an astounding book like no other, drawing us back in time to a world before digital cameras and photography, when each journey and voyage was recorded by hand.

For those of you who like looking at travel journals and turn-of-the-century writings and photographs, this is a book you’ll want to add to your winter wishlist. I’m having so much fun looking at each page ~ this is armchair traveling at its finest.

“Let me accompany you for as long as it suits. Let us be frozen in time.” 8″ x 10″, acrylic on canvas, October 2007. A painting based on Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty.

A spectacular evening of great books, profound thoughts, amazing music, and to top it off, a marble hallway filled with mocha cream cakes for us to eat. I felt like we were living out one of the pages in Maira Kalman’s stories. She’s at the top of my list of favorite illustrators/writers/absolutely-inspiring human beings.

Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty is the must-own book of the year, in my opinion. The book is filled from cover to cover with her incredible full-color illustrations (most of them are paintings, each in itself a masterpiece), and the writings are her musings (from her year-long column in the New York Times), with personalities like Nabokov, Freud, Lincoln making appearances, in addition to the many ordinary people like the old lady walking down the street and the little girl in the park, who are each special in their own way. It’s the perfect mix of humor and some really touching thoughts on old age and departed loved ones. You can read the pages over and over, there’s just so much to look at and think about.

I’ll leave you with that, it’s a rainy day in Brooklyn and I’m going back to my book.

We’ve all got something we consider priceless, that others might not see the value of. I think mine is an old pair of scissors that I borrowed from my best friend when we were twelve that I still have in my closet. The plastic handles are faded now, but the blades still cut really well. When I look at the scissors I can vividly recall those afternoons when we sat on the living room carpet cutting pieces of colorful construction paper, working on our latest craft projects.

That bout of nostalgia came to mind after reading Taking Things Seriously by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes. What started as a project where they enlisted family, friends and strangers to submit ”photos and essays about ordinary things instilled with extraordinary significance” (pg. 9) turned into the book: ”an old fashioned wonder cabinet: […] an assemblage of this, that and the other thing (pg. 18)”. The book is like a short story collection with lots of really nice pictures. I found myself always looking at the picture first, trying to guess what meaning lay behind say, the velveeta box or the crumpled pie tin, and then reading the adjacent essay to find the answer. When my eyes went to the photograph again, I saw something different, something meaningful. 

Taking Things Seriously is a process, an experience in looking and interpreting, reminding us to take a good look at all the ordinary things around and to realize that they are each far more just that.

Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Book Festival: At the Spoonbill and Sugartown booth, we spotted the project-turned-new-book Learning to Love You More by Miranda July and friends. We saw long lines of people wrapped around the block, trying to get into speaking events by Jonathan Lethem and Dave Eggers. We opted for the picturesque courtroom where we listened to a very brainy talk by writers Francine Prose, A.M. Homes, and Bomb editor Betsy Sussler.

Francine Prose made a really good point (well, there were many good points, but this one stuck with me most), that when she’s preparing a new piece of work she tends not to look at what others have already written on the topic, because then she’ll feel like whatever she wanted to do, people have already said and done.

And A.M. Homes, on the subject of coincidence and foresight, said laughing, “we don’t know what we know, you know.”

We should give ourselves more credit for what’s bottled up inside our heads, and just go ahead and express those things in our own voices.

Keri Smith already has quite a following from the numerous guides and how-to’s that she’s written and drawn, generously sharing with us how she (and we) can get those creative juices flowing. Now she’s got another great book to add to our shelves ~ The Guerilla Art Kit. A few words of wisdom and pointers (like how to make street art respectful and nondisruptive), pages of illustrated how-to’s and instructions (my favorites are “seed bombs,” “public chalkboards” and “hidden fortunes”), some really cool templates, and she’ll have you ready to hit the sidewalk as an anonymous artist. And the book looks just as good as the content: a sturdy hardcover with spiral bound inserts printed on cardstock (so the book won’t get soggy if you’re following a page of instructions and you’ve got glue and paint on your fingers), filled from cover to cover with her fun illustrations.

Keri Smith reminds us that seeing things differently involves connecting with our surroundings, and in the case of guerilla art, letting our work be changed by the environment it’s placed in, getting rained or stepped on, and responded to by others: ”Like a random act of kindness, guerilla art has the potential to create a ripple effect. Imagine the postal worker running through his day, stopping for a moment to read a quote you have chalked onto the sidewalk. You have the power to enter into people’s daily routines” (pg. 15).

I’ve already gone through the book twice. Once the weather turns a little cooler I’ll be pulling on my walking boots and heading outside with a handful of seeds and chalk.

I was a bit (understatement) shocked to read that Orion Books, a British publishing house, has come up with a series called Compact Editions, where they’ve lopped off about forty percent of the original texts of classics like Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, and Moby Dick, just for the sake of making them more “readable.”

I’m one of those bookworms who loves classics, and as excessively wordy as some of them can be, I think that’s part and parcel of what they are.  I finished reading Anna Karenina (and loved it and plan to reread it) so now I’ll be making my way through Vanity Fair. Strange to say, the reason why I like reading these things is for the drama that the characters get caught up in, which is a lot more interesting than any of the shows on tv these days.

So my recent foray into reading the classics should mean more visits to second-hand bookstores (there’s something so much more appropriate about reading about a story set a hundred years ago from a book where the pages are worn and tinted than in a crisp copy from amazon or Barnes and Noble). But the problem is, most of the quaint little bookshops that carry used books are also often inhabited by a friendly feline or two, dozing contentedly on the shelf, making them off-limits to those of us who are allergic to cats.

I finished reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth a while ago, and I highly recommend it, especially if you’re in the mood for a dose of really good British humor and drama. I think I’m particularly fond of British writing because I spent the first ten years of my life at a little private school where we wore gray and purple uniforms and sang God Save the Queen every morning. Here’s an excerpt from the book which had me laughing out loud while I read it:

“Put your hand down.” “I will not put it down.” “Put it down, please.” “Let go of me.”

“Samad, why are you so eager to mortify me? Put it down.”

“I have an opinion. I have a right to an opinion. And I have a right to express that opinion.”

“Yes, but do you have to express it so often?”

This was the exchange between Samad and Alsana Iqbal, as they sat at the back of a Wednesday school governors’ meeting in early July ‘84. Alsana, trying her best to force Samad’s determined left arm back to his side.

“Get off woman!”

Alsana put her two tiny hands to his wrist and tried applying a Chinese burn. “Samad Miah, can’t you understand that I am only trying to save you from yourself?”

As the covert wrestling continued, the chairwoman, Katie Miniver, a lanky white divorcee with tight jeans, extremely curly hair, and buckteeth, tried desperately to avoid Samad’s eye. She silenty cursed Mrs. Hanson, the fat lady just behind him, who was speaking about the woodworm in the school orchard, inadvertently making it impossible to pretend that Samad’s persistent hand had gone unseen. Sooner or later, she would have to let him speak.

(pg. 106, White Teeth by Zadie Smith)

I know that because we saw three of them swimming in a lake a couple of weeks ago. Coincidentally, that was right after I finished reading David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.

“I was changing out of my school uniform when this dream of a silver MG cruised down Kingfisher Meadows. Into our driveway it swung, and parked under my bedroom window. Rain’d been spitting all afternoon, so the top was up. My first view of my sister’s boyfriend, then, was via aerial surveillance. I’d expected Ewan to look sort of Prince Edwardish, but he’s got exploding red hair, sooty freckles, and a bouncy walk. He wore a peach shirt under a baggy indigo sweater, black drainpipes, one of those studded belts that sags loose off your hips, and winkle-pickers with white tube socks, like everyone’s been wearing recently. I yelled up to Julia’s attic that Ewan was here. Thumps thumped, a bottle was knocked over, and Julia muttered, “Bugger.” (What is it that girls do before they go out? Julia takes aeons to get ready. Dean Moran says his’re just the same.) Then she yelled, “MUM! Will you get it?” Mum was already hurrying down the hall. I took up my sniper’s-nest position on the landing.” (pg. 106)

Suffice to say that I’m keeping this book on my shelf and I plan to read it again (and possibly, even after that, again). Because it’s absolutely epic.