The Literary Snob

Announcement

Alright I have an announcement. I’m taking the summer off to go walk all 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago from St. Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I’ll be out of contact for a month to a month and a half from mid-June until mid to late August, which means The Literary Snob will be on hiatus for that period. One of my biggest regrets was being forced to stop walking the Camino in Pamplona last year due to having to catch a plane back to the States, so I’m going back and finishing it. In the meantime I’m leaving for Europe on June 5th to catch up with my family and see some old friends.

@6 days ago with 17 notes

mabelchiltern:

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

“The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.” - W. Somerset Maugham

(via breathingbooks)

@2 days ago with 1109 notes

"In 1915, in Geneva, I avidly read Crime and Punishment in the very readable version by Constance Garnett. That novel, whose heroes are a murderer and a prostitute, seemed to me no less atrocious than the war that surrounded us. I imagined at the time that Dostoyevsky was a kind of great unfathomable God, capable of understanding and justifying all beings. I was astonished that he had occasionally descended to mere politics, that he discriminated and condemned.

To read a book by Dostoyevsky is to penetrate a great city unknown to us, or the shadow of a battle. Crime and Punishment revealed to me, among other things, a world different from my own. When I read Demons, something very strange occurred. I felt that I had returned home. The steppes were a magnification of the pampas. Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky were, despite their unwieldy names, old irresponsible Argentines. The book began with joy, as if the narrator did not know its tragic end.

In the preface to an anthology of Russian literature, Vladimir Nabokov stated that he had not found a single page of Dostoyevsky worthy of inclusion. This ought to mean that Dostoyevsky should not be judged by each page but rather by the total of all the pages that comprise the book."

Jorge Luis Borges, prologue to Demons (via literarylust)

(Source: speakmnemosyne, via literarylust)

@2 days ago with 177 notes

bulletproofjewels:

why do people let me on the internet, I don’t even think this is funny.

(via fuckyeahhistorycrushes)

@3 days ago with 1483 notes

teachingliteracy:

Amazing 3D Book Collages Bring Classic Stories to Life

(Source: unicorn-meat-is-too-mainstream)

@4 days ago with 7138 notes

"I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them"

Emma Thompson (via iwaschangedforgood)

(via wenchingwithshakespeare)

@6 days ago with 69 notes

booksandghosts asked: That's really cool that you'll be doing the Camino de Santiago. I have wanted to hike that for ages. So jealous

I highly recommend it if you get a chance. I did about 70 miles of it last summer and really fell in love with the experience.

@6 days ago with 2 notes
#booksandghosts