Klimtchick > Recent Status Updates

Happily surprised to realize that I am all caught up in my book challenge!

Managed to read about and listen to every daily piece of music on the correct October day (first whole month that I've managed it this year). Thanks again to Maijabeep for the Spotify playlist tip!

So picking a 932 page book to read next might not be the best way to catch up on my reading challenge...

Re-reading this book about the plague to see if there are any lessons for the current pandemic.

“One demonstration of this leisureliness, Benjamin goes on to say, was the fashion, around 1840, for taking turtles for walks in the arcades. “The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. If they had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace.”

What's not to love about a book with a chapter titled "The Legs of William Wordsworth"❤️

I've been wanting to read this book while on a multi day walk. Starting it this evening after walking the first section of Scotland's West Highland away.

Can't resist re-reading this lovely novel since I'm actually in Saint Malo!

Whereas previously the sovereign and his advisors defined artistic activity from this point forward there was a proliferation of patrons in both the sacred and the secular worlds. Paris gave birth to the Gothic style.

Paris is a she. After the fall of Rome, Lutetia went back to her Gallic roots and once again became Parisii. She had a hard time during the 6-10th centuries due to those pesky Vikings. And yet life went on and art flourished during the Medieval period .

Part 1 - The Origins: From Lutetia to Paris. Evidence from the Bercy excavations suggest that by 4200 BCE Paris was an important crossroads for influences and traffic from the Mediterranean world as well as from the shores of the Atlantic and inland Europe. The Romans established the North-South axis in Paris, today inscribed in Paris topography as the Rue St-Jacques.

Finally getting serious about making way through this treasure in preparation for my first longer sojourn in Paris. This book aims to demonstrate "..how this creative centre has been fed by the most diverse sources, drawing on all of Europe and the world, and, finally, how the art of Pris is also an art of living, an art de vivre". (Introduction by Michel Lacotte)

Brilliant,delightful, challenging book, with a clever narrative structure that sneaks up on the reader. Stunningly, vivid characters, both human and dendroidal, whose absence I now mourn.

How could I possibly resist this title?

Finished the first two decades of Alice Hoffman's published novels - getting closer to known territory.

"In the sleep that I do not sleep every night, I find comfort of mind that enables me to not kill myself throughout the next sleep-tortured day. I call this state of mind, in which I think of sleep but do not sleep, negative sleep, for want of a better word."

Particularly fascinating to read this book on a relatively posh cruise of the Amazon and meet some of the descendants of the Indigenous peoples devastated by European man's desire to conquer the tree of rivers.