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monheganmemoriallibrary

A #bookstagram account featuring Mia’s favorite books from the Library! 📚 Every book posted is available for checkout. 📖

“From the beginning, Aya didn’t necessarily need t “From the beginning, Aya didn’t necessarily need the piano. Since childhood, when she first heard the sound of horses galloping in the rain as it lashed on the tin roof, she could hear — and enjoy — music from many different sources.” 

This book depicts the joy of music for me. Music is play, discovery, the sheer pleasure of finding your own artistry. And music is an expression of the world. I’ve never read something so like my own inner experience with music. It’s been a long time since I played piano. This is my favorite score, annotated by my teacher. My time as a pianist is a precious memory. I thank Riku Onda for conjuring it up.

#piano #honeybeesanddistantthunder #bach #rikuonda
“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rock “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

I read this when I was 15. My English teacher had us underlining every other word. It was a master text for explaining literary mechanisms to a group of high schoolers. Looking back, I’m skeptical of the near perfect amount of symbolism it provided. But I loved the book.

I later read a piece about “Wuthering Heights” that pointed out that Emily Brontë died at age 30. This book, her only novel, was written at age 27 and takes place in an emotional landscape that might strike older readers as strange. This gave me a whole new understanding of the book and why it resonated with me at that time. It’s more than just a sentimental tale made for English Lit 101. It is wild as the moors. It shows an unfiltered (and therefore slightly unhinged) version of love. What a memory. 

#wutheringheights #emilybrontë #heathcliff #cathy
“If it were possible to bridge the distance betwee “If it were possible to bridge the distance between me and Italian, I would stop writing in that language.”

This book can be read as a memoir of craft. It is a travelogue, a journey: real and metaphorical. And it’s also about foreignness, what it means to be “other.” As someone who has also navigated foreign countries, as a brown person who’s also often stuck between two worlds, and as a writer who loves words, Lahiri’s observations read like a special revelation to me. 

#jhumpalahiri #inotherwords #italian #bilingual
“I loved the song I was living in.” This book is “I loved the song I was living in.”

This book is a spell. It is a fairytale, but set in the glitzy world of fashion and modeling. Like any book about a spell, it is also about breaking the enchantment. And like anything about beauty, it is also about ugliness. Most of all, I loved it for the way it talks about the hidden rooms in music. 

#marygaitskill #veronica #modeling
“My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mi “My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly.”

From his hospital bed, he travels. He walks through places he’s visited and places he wishes to go, he relives memories, and he considers with wonder the things around him: drawings from his children, a view of the sea, the alphabet system his speech therapist has devised to help him communicate. For Bauby has locked-in syndrome, and can only move his left eyelid. This whole book was composed in over 200,000 blinks, transcribed by Claude Mendibil. 

It reminds me of the way that my mind too can wander and help me escape my diving bell—whether that heaviness is physical or mental. Our diving bells are not the same, but the feeling of a diving bell is something I resonate with.

This week, I wanted to know that beautiful things exist. I wanted to be aware of the butterflies that surround our diving bells and sometimes even penetrate them. I wanted to know that escape is possible, even if you cannot truly escape. If you, too, need this awareness: pick up this book.

#thedivingbellandthebutterfly
Well, are you?! This book is so sweet. It’s for mo Well, are you?! This book is so sweet. It’s for mothers everywhere. But what it especially reminds me of, are those people we find who aren’t our mothers and we wish they were. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, they can step into the role for a season or for longer. It’s a special kind of relationship. I kind of want to show this book to my “second mom.” 🙂 #pdeastman #areyoumymother #transference #mothersday
“Feral. He wanted to be free.” I love this book “Feral. He wanted to be free.” 

I love this book fiercely. It is so much: hawks & falconry, a diary of grief, a wrestling with nature and literature. Most of all it is the embedded biography of TH White, tortured and trying to redeem himself through a hawk. My heart stirred so greatly for him. Helen breaks the spell for herself and for White on these pages. I can’t recommend a finer book on the subject of creation. #hisforhawk #thwhite
“The error of love that proved its perfection.” T “The error of love that proved its perfection.”

This is less a book and more of a multi voiced unfolding poem. Atleast that’s how it felt to me. I went through it not trying to understand, certain I’ll come back for closer reading later. I let what little plot there is go and was just there with the language. So I can’t really tell you what this book is. Except one of the most beautiful reading experiences I’ve had recently. #annemichaels
“Whose woods these are I think I know.” How many “Whose woods these are I think I know.”

How many of us recited this in school? I did! Yet, it was when I heard Frost himself read it that I really grasped why this might be a classic poem. Opening this book and placing the accompanying CD in the player, listening to his voice, I suddenly heard what was hiding in this simple poem. It was a moment you’d like to stay in: dark and deep, peaceful and quiet. Yet you can’t stay. You have to keep going. 

Atleast that’s what I heard. 

You can listen to even more amazing poets read their own works here: Whitman. Millay. Brooks. Hughes. This is a real hidden gem in our collection, in my opinion. We also have a similar children’s anthology. 

So take this and hear beloved poems as they were meant to be experienced! I guarantee: you will feel different.

(Yes I know CD players are a rarity these days 🥹…the Library has one that hooks to a MacBook that you can borrow.)

#robertfrost #stoppingbywoodsonasnowyevening #poetryspeaks
Yes, it’s an atlas. Yes we have it in the library. Yes, it’s an atlas. Yes we have it in the library. 

This is the Rand McNally Road Atlas ‘06, so it’s incredibly outdated. I’m not sure what would be different though—-do exit numbers change? I suppose some highways must have been rerouted in those two decades. One thing for sure: if I tried to read an atlas in a moving car today? I’d probably puke. 

But I remember balancing it on my knees and not getting carsick. Some states were really big and took a surprising amount of time to get through. Like Virginia. The way we passed in and out of Delaware delighted me though.

I also loved flipping to states I’d never seen. I developed an interest in Montana. I liked that looked like a face with a nose. And there was so much blank space. I have still never been to Montana! But that’s the thing about the atlas. It captures your imagination. You don’t even have to be driving. Reading the maps is an exploration. 

Looking at this atlas, I feel sad about how our phones have changed travel. I appreciate google maps. Like most of us, I rely on it pretty heavily.

But I miss this.

#randmcnally #roadatlas
“He thinks, winter is here. I am at Launde. I have “He thinks, winter is here. I am at Launde. I have stumbled deep into the crisp white snow.”

What’s it like to read a book where you know the character dies at the end? The answer is, unnerving. Surprisingly suspenseful. Sad but in an ironic way. 

I skimmed a bit. Tudor names and politics were too complicated and boring. But this is the heart of it: Tudor England is brutal. Violent, cruel. Strange to say, that was a hook for me. That’s what made this book more than a relic of the past. The first two in the series as well, but this one most. It’s about mortality. Death. I’ve never found a book that pushes you off the edge and lets you take in the experience as you fall. We can’t do that as we die. So, though unlike Cromwell I doubt I will meet my end with a French executioner, still. This is the mark of good fiction. This book just inspires the feeling: Oh, is that what it’s like?

#hilarymantel #themirrorandthelight #thomascromwell #tudors #wolfhall
“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

I read this book growing up. It was maybe the first poetry I really knew. I admit I sometimes find Mary Oliver a little much. Too smooth. Too earnest. Perhaps it’s the effect of a few famous poems, shared over and over. Yet as I revisit this volume today, it’s not the famous ones I remember loving. It was the darker ones. Mary Oliver writes extravagantly about loving the world. But she also writes about leaving the world. Now I realize that death, not just the profound beauty of nature, is actually her theme. 

I also realize just how many of her phrases have stayed with me since those early readings. Each time I look at peonies, I think they’re “getting ready to break my heart.” Sometimes I imagine “that long, blue body of light.” All around me things are “luminous” “throbbing” “before they are nothing, forever.” The non-nature lines too—the rhythm in “I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.”

I’m glad I have these Mary Oliver things in the back of my mind. May they be steady guides as I travel through this life. And out of it.

#maryoliver
“The stars had only one task: they taught me how t “The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read. / They taught me I had a language in heaven / and another language on earth.”

These poems unfurled for me with so much beauty I was amazed it had taken me so long to read them. Is it strange to say: they reminded me of Rumi mixed with Leonard Cohen? I felt I was flying through a night of symbols. Some replay many times, like the hoopoe, or the olive tree. I can’t claim to understand these poems but I love being in them. I am so grateful to have discovered this. 

#mahmouddarwish #unfortunatelyitwasparadise
“And I wasn’t paralyzed by fear or stunned into sp “And I wasn’t paralyzed by fear or stunned into spontaneous memory loss. Nothing like that. I didn’t do anything simply because I decided not to.”

When I finished this book, I immediately tried to get someone else to read it, so I could see how they reacted to its development. It is a book that starts one way, that makes you think it’s one thing. Something melancholy but sweet. Harmless. And then…it veers. I wouldn’t have loved it without that twist. For how it got dark in all the right ways. Read it and compare notes with me!

#sarabaume #spillsimmerfalterwither
“And through these cuttings, as much as through hi “And through these cuttings, as much as through his fairy tales, he was able to express himself and his private world of make-believe.”

Hans Christian Andersen, creator of the saddest fairy tales ever, is a writer I have always loved. This book is a surprising and delightful find—a biography (young adult level) but with an emphasis on his papercutting! Made as he was telling stories to children and then gifted to the child, some cuttings were treasured and preserved. But most of them are probably lost. The ones that appear on these pages are just as strange as his tales. I love artists who work in more than one medium. And now I know my favorite Hans Christian Andersen was one! #hanschristianandersen #papercutting
“I am so happy,” Constance said at last, gasping. “I am so happy,” Constance said at last, gasping. “Merricat, I am so happy.”

There is nothing scarier to me than a slow mental descent, and that’s what I felt like was happening reading this book. I still have an image in my mind of that house hidden by vines. And the two women inside, given over to their complete isolation and their insanity. A hole in the cardboard to look out, but no one can see in. Ever again. That, has haunted me. #shirleyjackson #wehavealwayslivedinthecastle #halloween
“This is no ordinary aquarium.” The ocean is fas “This is no ordinary aquarium.” 

The ocean is fascinating and vital, but it is also profoundly artistic and inspirational.  Of this I am convinced. I’ve lived by the ocean my entire life but it’s only recently that I’ve deepened my relationship with it, though underwater photography. In the midst of this exploration/obsession, this book comes to the Library. I have always enjoyed Victorian naturalist sketches. And I have always loved nature assemblages (pictured here are some of my prize pieces as well as the shell collection of a friend.) This book is the essence of those things. So much wonder between two covers! Take it to a tidepool with you and see the magic reveal itself in real life. #oceanarium #welcometothemuseumseries
“I showed him kindness. He remained a monster.” T “I showed him kindness. He remained a monster.”

This book will kill you to read. It’s brutal. Another one to give a strong trigger warning for: this is a novel about a woman who is kidnapped and raped. Yet this must be on my bookstagram because it is maybe the most well written book I’ve ever read. I am presently working through Gay’s memoir “Hunger.” And I understand now how she was able to write this novel. I finished it in just a couple sittings back in 2016. I considered it, but don’t know if I can bear a re-reading. Really though I don’t need to: it’s haunted me ever since. #roxanegay #anuntamedstate
“I would have to turn around and face her, she who “I would have to turn around and face her, she who might be myself, but who was definitely herself.”

This book attracted me with its premise—a woman seeing her double. It enchanted me with its prose: spare and surreal so you feel like you’re floating. And, it made me fall in love with its core: an adopted girl who is looking for her mother. This book walks the delicate line between being both a stylish work of art and being emotionally true. And, it makes me remember back when I was a pianist. Excuse me while I go read everything by Deborah Levy now. #deborahlevy #augustblue
“O, the imagination of a new reborn boy/ but most “O, the imagination of a new reborn boy/ but most of us settle on 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦.”

This is THE best poetry chapbook I have ever read. That’s really all I have to say about it. Every line destroys you. I mean. In a poem called “every day is a funeral & a miracle,” Smith says “America might kill me before i get the chance.” Says “today, Tamir Rice/ tomorrow, my liver” and “do i think someone created AIDS?…anything is possible in a place/where you can burn a body/with less outrage than a flag.” Says, to sum it up: “they sent a boy/when the bullet missed.” That’s just one big poem out of 29 and not even necessarily my favorite. I cannot adequately portray the power of this book. You must simply read it. #danezsmith #dontcallusdead
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