Juxtabook

Quebec’s Garden of Decaying Books

I imagine many people will have mixed feelings looking at this, a garden where, "As time passed, the some 40,000 books and wood plates making up the walls of their garden have decayed and dissolved, while new life has also found its way in to the space."

In truth booksellers throw out very many books all the time: over-productions, book club editions, the broken spined, the missing paged, etc. I can see no better use for such books than this natural decay that provides both a work of art and a great environment for insects. I know some people can't bear the thought that books should be thrown out (probably the second most thing common customers, who are selling books to me, tell me) and not everyone will like it but I think it is rather charming. What do you think?

You see read more here.

I can across this via my Facebook timeline but I am afraid I can't remember who to thank!

Reading Lists

I came across this great post on "Reading lists and how to wrangle them". The writer said we could share her great flow chart - very useful if you have just received your first reading lists for uni. Hopefully if you click you can enlarge it. You can read the original post here and follow the author on twitter here.

The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby

 The Land Of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby has one of the most startling and memorable heroines that I've had the pleasure to encounter in a long time. For this alone it has been one of my favourite reads of this year.

Joanna is born in South Africa to a missionary father and a romantically minded mother who had longed to travel. Her mother dies immediately and Joanna is sent to live with her spinster aunts back in her mother's native Yorkshire. She inherits her mother's strong imagination and as a child, tripping along with her stately relatives, she sees the end of The Land of Green Ginger a romantically named street in Hull. Her aunts are busy, and Joanna, to whom this seems like fairyland, is disappointed that she cannot explore.

Growing up Joanna is unconventional and says what goes through her imaginative head. With her close friends she plans her education and her travels. With her father dead her links with abroad seem severed and she can't wait to spread her wings as we approach 1914.

Working in a nursing home she meets a young man visiting. Teddy tells her he has "just been given the world to wear as a golden ball". In reality he is more consumptive that romantic and after the rigours of the war Joanna is left with two small children, an invalid husband and an inefficient farm in the wilds of the North Riding that they can't really manage. Her old friends meanwhile are both footloose and travelling abroad.

Joanna's imagination is a blessing but interferes with any practical view of her situation. Her dilapidated farm is described thus:

Joanna used to think that the house was like a ship, and the rolling curve of the moors like great ocean waves. Its windows at night shone like the post-holes of a tramp steamer, ploughing its way up the North Sea in dirty weather. She had never seen ships except in Kingsport Docks and from the esplanade at Hardrascliffe, but she felt sure that they were like this.

The bulk of the novel deals with Joanna's life in Yorkshire, of the social expectations of her as a wife and mother and the community's reaction to her, of their financial difficulties, their marriage difficulties and what happens to a young woman of imagination in such constrained circumstances. Her flights of fancy often take her abroad but in the end abroad comes to her in the form of a dispossessed aristocratic Hungarian they are persuaded to take in as a  much needed paying guest. In the hands of another writer we might be able to see what was coming here, but this is a Winifred Holtby novel, and women are not so predictable.

Joanna's trials and tribulations are largely specific to her era but the feeling of unfulfillment and the loss of the imaginative life when bogged down in the mundane everyday things is universal. In truth though the book is not as strong as might be plot-wise and loses its way here and there in a rather fairytale way. However Joanna stays in the mind and I know she will do so long after the book is shut, even more so than Sarah Burton in the wonderful South Riding . Throughout the book has tons of charm without being saccharine. A funny kind of modernist fairytale on the transformative power of imagination, in its own way this book is a little gem.