№ 2 reading list: bookshelf styling

I have a bookshelf crush. Not my first. The July issue of Elle Decoration UK has a feature that has had me swooning just a little with my coffee, a home in LA that has so many right touches ('House on the Hills', photographed by Stephanie Bjelkstam). The open shelves in the living room display an uncluttered mix of books and decorative objects; books arranged both vertically and horizontally, adding visual interest. The shelves seem to breathe and echo the rug on the floor. Beautifully done. These days I'm reading a few books and soon I will be reviewing one of them on the blog: Decorative Textiles from Arab and Islamic Cultures: Selections from the Al Lulwa Collection. That Egyptian cotton appliqué to the left is a little preview.

My summer reading list is ready (I should probably call it my early summer reading list) and consists of plays and autobiographical writing. Recently I returned playwright Arthur Miller's memoir Timebends (wonderfully written, highly recommend it) to the library and picked up two of his plays. On the same day I was browsing online for works by Virginia Woolf and was lucky to find two used copies (vol. 3 of her diary has arrived and looks like new - love it). Here is my list:

1  All My Sons  by Arthur Miller
2  Death of a Salesman  by Arthur Miller
3  Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg  by

Carolyn Cassady

4  The Diary of Virginia Woolf - Volume 3: 1925-1930  edited by Anne

Olivier Bell

5  The Letters of Virginia Woolf - Volume II: 1912-1922  edited by Nigel

Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann)

6  Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 

by Vera Brittain

Some people would perhaps call this a bit heavy reading in summertime but I'm just not one of those readers who pick up a stack of quick-reads at the local bookshop. My children were making fun of me recently, saying that I read weird books. I'm trying to remember the exact phrase one of them used, 'English upper-class snob literature' or something like that. It cracked me up.

On a more personal note: It's the National Day of Iceland and my husband and I celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary. It's also Friday pizza day but he's abroad for work. The children and I are going for French cheese, baguette and grapes ... and chocolate. Have a wonderful weekend!

images by me | credit - top photo: Elle Decoration UK, July 2016, p. 116 · Stephanie Bjelkstam

№ 1 reading list: M Train by Patti Smith

I'm sitting here with coffee in the safety of my home, feeling shaken, sad and numb by events in Brussels. There is also a feeling inside that I don't have a word for. As most of you know, Belgium was our home for two years and immediately my thoughts were, Are our friends safe? Most of them live in Antwerp and, fortunately, we have received no bad news. When I watch the news I cannot help but thinking that the Icelandic Embassy is just a short walk from the Maelbeek station. When one has walked these streets this just feels too close to home.

···

Looking at the stack of books after my library visit I thought it odd to go straight from reading the diaries and works of Virginia Woolf to Patti Smith's M Train. Well, it sounded odd. All of a sudden my mind was going, Wait a minute, didn't I see an interview with Patti taken in the Charleston House? It was the home of artists Vanessa Bell (Woolf's sister) and Duncan Grant. I looked it up and found it on YouTube and there she was, talking about her admiration for the house and the Bloomsbury group's artistic way of living. I even found a clip of her reading Woolf to an audience.

Going from Virginia to Patti now seemed a basic choice.

Patti Smith starts M Train with the words, 'It's not so easy writing about nothing.' If she is writing about nothing, she is certainly good at it. I hardly looked up from the reading and before finishing had decided to buy my own copy. To give you some idea of this 'nothing', during the reading you will drink plenty of coffee with Patti in the Greenwich Village, and likely mourn Café 'Ino on Bedford Street, visit graves of authors in various corners of the world, and watch detective series. Remember Linden and Holden from The Killing (the US version of the Danish series Forbrydelsen)? Those two are there. Haruki Murakami is there; his book that 'did [her] in' was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (p. 94). The most important presence on the pages is her late husband Fred Sonic Smith (d. 1994). At one point she touchingly writes: 'You've been gone long enough. Just come back' (p. 171). In a way M Train is a book about nothing, yet it left me with an unexplainable richness. My only disappointment was that it ended. I cannot wait to pick up Just Kids, her memoir that won her the 2010 National Book Award. I shamefully have to admit that I haven't read it.

Perhaps inspired by Virginia Woolf, who occasionally wrote down reading lists in her diary, here is mine for this spring:

1  M Train  by Patti Smith
2  Among the Bohemians  by Virginia Nicholson
3  The Shadow of the Sun  by Ryszard Kapuscinski
4  Timebends: A Life  by Arthur Miller
5  The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia  by Paul Theroux
6  African Textiles by John Gillow
7  Japanese Textiles: In the Victoria and Albert Museum by Anna Jackson
8  Art: A New History  by Paul Johnson

The first on the list is already marked as read and I had started reading the next two, finding Nicholson's book delightfully entertaining. When I started reading Miller's autobiography it grabbed me and I think my next reading list will contain one of his plays. It's been years since I read anything by him.