Travel by Book
Several books and movies have sparked my wish to travel.
Pearl BuckIn books, it was Pearl Buck’s stories of China, “Out of Africa” by Isak Dinesen, and Walter Scott’s Scottish tales.
I have been to Africa and Scotland; China, not yet. Of course, I’ve never found the road to Narnia, although I always feel the urge to explore the backs of wardrobes in the hope that someday …
With movies, it’s been “Best Little Marigold Hotel”, “Ghost and the Darkness”, “Gigi”,  “Breakfast at Tiffanys”… (I never read the last as a book it was the movie that nailed it down for me) .And any movie set in London, my favorite city.
Morse in Oxford
 
When it comes to TV, I want to go again to Morse’s Oxford.
AFAR magazine has their own ideas, Derek Richardson writes, and offers several more films and books that inspire the urge to travel.
 
AFAR’s FILMS that inspire travel HERE
17 BOOKS that inspire travel HERE
And for good measure, songs, including “I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash
Songs to travel by HERE
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The Were Chronicles continue
Read an excerpt from Book 2, WOLF, Mal’s story, Wolf posterRead it HERE
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Literary Adventures for Every Day of the Week
“It can be easy to get stuck in a reading rut,” Julianna Haubner says at Off the Shelf, “so here’s a fun and untraditional angle to inspire your reading: a fantastic book for every day of the week.”
For example
month-of-sundays
A Month of Sundays, by John Updike:
In this update of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Tom Marshfield is banished from his Midwest parish in the wake of a sex scandal. He keeps a journal of all his thoughts and desires, and at the center of it all is his growing infatuation with a woman named Ms. Prynne.
 
 
 
Check the other days HERE
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García MárquezBrain Pickings illustration
Gabriel García Márquez’s Formative Reading List
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova offers us 24 books that shaped one of humanity’s greatest writers, “along with some of the endearing anecdotes he tells about them.”
e.g.
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner: “I became aware that my adventure in reading Ulysses at the age of twenty, and later The Sound and the Fury, were premature audacities without a future, and I decided to reread them with a less biased eye. In effect, much of what had seemed pedantic or hermetic in Joyce and Faulkner was revealed to me then with a terrifying beauty and simplicity.”
Read the whole story HERE
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Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google
If you were airdropped, blindfolded, into a strange town and given nothing but a bus ticket, to where would you ride that bus?” Amien Essif asks at AlterNet.
You might be surprised to learn that there’s only one good answer, and that’s the public library. The library is the public living room, and if ever you are stripped of everything private—money, friends and orientation—you can go there and become a human again.
people in librariesOf course, you don’t have to be homeless to use a library, but that’s the point. You don’t have to be anyone in particular to go inside and stay as long as you want, sit in its armchairs, read the news, write your dissertation, charge your phone, use the bathroom, check your email, find the address of a hotel or homeless shelter. Of all the institutions we have, both public and private, the public library is the truest democratic space.
Read the whole story HERE
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A Pencil Shop, for Texting the Old-Fashioned Way
Pencil shop
Photographs by Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times
A store devoted to pencils has opened in Lower Manhattan, Molly Young writes in the New York Times. “If the enterprise seems belated, well, it is. Who uses a pencil anymore?”
Pencils are like fax machines and margarine, she adds. “They do a job, sure, but other things do the same job better — pens, email and butter, respectively. You can write a letter in pencil, but it’s more adult to write in pen. You can solve a crossword in pencil, but it’s more courageous in pen.”
Framed vintage advertisements on the wall depict the likes of Booth Tarkington shilling his favorite pencils. (Tarkington’s advice to young writers: “Use pencils. Write on thick paper. Sharpen two or three dozen rather soft pencils before you work. Use pencils with erasers on them — and use the erasers!”)
Read the whole story HERE
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THIS ‘n THAT
Is it “anyway” or “any way“? “All together” or “altogether“?
More confusing words HERE
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Oh yeah. I’d go for this. And there would be a whole damn FOREST out there with my name on it.
biodegradable coffee  cup
 
Embedded with seeds, coffee cup grow into trees when thrown away.
 
 
 
earth porm shows us Plantable Coffee Cups HERE
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Quote of the day
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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Alma Alexander     My books    Email me
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