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Exactly like reading A Wrinkle In Time, but this is for real…

Oh please don’t ever let this end

Peg is not a character i warm to in the least! And yet the novel revolves around her.

I’m in heaven!

“Many times I would loan my shirts to David to wear onstage when he had a shortage of clean clothes. Those Lacoste polo shirts you used to see him in? Those were mine.”
Seriously? Every swipe he makes at David just makes me dislike this book just that bit more. #tone

I recommend this book to those who love Colette but also to those many of us, who are Francophiles. This is a confrontation with a slice of Parisian history- from the belle epoch to modernism through a unique feminine lens. Harrowing. Distressing. Wonderful and deeply satisfying. Colette is to be revered but first known deeply. This book manages to negotiate the brutal, survivalist truth with her glorious lushness.

Southampton is a great researcher and energetic history writer who appears to value the lives of these modernists without real feel or response to their contributions to literature and the arts. Very readable, full of character but somehow too rushed and not evocative.

I’m enjoying... but the question I find in myself is: how much of my admiration for Leonardo is inherited? I was taught his genius by rote rather than discovery. This book isn’t really assisting me to discover Leonardo with my own naked eye. It is meticulously researched and balances the man, the scientist, the avid and joyful intellectual and the artist. I will continue...

This book is so beautifully heartfelt and true. It brings to mind all the pain of the brutal colonisation of Tibet but is also testimony of the humility of Pistono. It is rocking me to my core but also filling me with awe and remembrance. What a good find this book is for me.

I am running hot and cold with this book. But just as I begin to consider putting this one down, I read something like page 152’s explanation about the difference between how introverts and extroverts see the function of small talk. The book just redeemed itself. Still, I often wonder why we need so much psychological evidence in order to share the human experience...

Oh dang. Why did I even start? I know I won’t put this away until it is read. The writing is tiny! Which makes it so difficult to read and sometimes the images are too small to make out the details discussed by the author. I think this is a coffee table book rather than an art history book. It uses art as a key to history.

This book is painfully deliciously gloriously beautiful. I’m so homesick for the continents of my ancestors. I’m so restless. I’m so filled with longing. I’m drawing closer to the books end and I will miss it so much.

I am at home on a public holiday Monday afternoon in Sydney. It’s so humid and I’m wearing a long earth brown dress and My legs are slung over the arms of my old arm chair. Ram Das is singing ram ram ram and I’m reading Doerr speaking at his bliss of being a father. And I’m blissing out, looking up Roman piazzas on google maps.

Oh how I am cherishing this book x

I just found a full stop- like a ray of light

"AND so sit-in in the Caffe Trieste San Francisco where nothing ever changes decade after decade, the faces change but it's the same characters drawn from the population of the world, and where am I with my constant companion my lonely self and the only plot of this book of my life being my constant raging..."

I love this book and I am not sure why as yet I loved it in its narrative form and I love it still in its white water stream of consciousness Im alone tonight so I am reading it out loud to myself and feeling into its rhythms and into the fade-in and fade-outs of themes mothers and Adam and eve and a chorus of me me me in a world like a deep swimming pool with the sides perpetually out of reach and I love it.

Oh good grief! Is this the finest imagining of pleasure, sexuality and attraction that Aciman can imagine? There is a constant woe, desperation, violence, deception, manipulation and a predatory energy dripping through every page. This is not freedom.

To capture Mirka Mora’s life or practice, a writer requires the same sensibility, humour and sensuality. I am grateful for this book and am enjoying the intimacy of its many captures and portraits, but it makes me miss Mirka all the more. It is too dry to bring her colours back into the world.

‘Composing a vast reinterpretation of history through an ongoing dream’ p114. I love Smith for publishing these half dreamt thoughts, this tome of imperfection and incompleteness, this obscure unadorned simplicity. May I dare as fearlessly as she, in this new year.