A home away from home
F.O.J. Nancy Pearl reviews Michael Dirda’s Book by Book for the Washington Post, and points out that he gives suggestions for a well-stocked guest room library:
One section is, as they say, particularly worth the price of admission: “The Guest-Room Library.” Dirda recommends some general categories of books for the ideal guest bedroom — in addition to a Bible, the collected works of Shakespeare, a novel or two by Jane Austen and a recent edition of Leonard Maltin’s guide to movies — including mysteries, humor, biography, poetry, children’s classics, philosophy, reference and journals and diaries.
We would certainly feel at home in such a guest room!
May 18th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Good to see they are not sticking to Mark Twain’s views: “Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”
May 19th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Should you take comfort in this clip from Monday’s NY Times on his 1866 visit to Hawaii? Perhaps there’s a theme, women and Wrong Way Twain?
Mark Twain’s Hawaii
…America’s greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, “for a particularly prodigious billow to come along,” upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.
“None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly,” he wrote.
He also tried swimming with nude native women, but when he got into the surf, they got out…