Bookshop magic

Recently I went to a bookshop to buy two books on my wish list and took a moment to browse. As one does. Suddenly my eye caught something on a low shelf in the plays & poetry corner, the black & white café photograph on the book cover in my pic above. I saw the German title, Dichter im Café (Poet/Poets in the Café) and for a split second read the author’s name as Hermann Hesse before realising it was Hermann Kesten. I had never heard of Kesten, or not that I could recall. I picked it up, turned it over and read:

Das Kaffeehaus - legendärer Treffpunkt
des literarischen Austauschs, Umschlagplatz
revolutionärer Ideen, Bühne des Lebens.

These words on the back cover could be literally translated: The coffee house - legendary meeting place for literary exchange, a hub for revolutionary ideas, the stage of life.

I brought the book to the seating nook, where the magic happened. Well, it had started when I spotted the book but continued as I sat reading the preface. I understood everything; if I didn't understand a single word the context was always clear. The second sentence read: 'Das Kaffeehaus is ein Wartesaal der Poesie' (The coffee house is the waiting room of the poetry) and as I continued I knew I had to buy this book, the only copy left in the bookshop.

My silence on the blog can be explained by a move to the heart of Linz this summer, which you may have seen on Instagram, and various assignments. The beauty of the new location is having a bookshop within a short walking distance - browsing before doing the groceries gives life new meaning. I will be back soon with a new and long overdue reading list.

images mine, the 2nd appeared on Instagram 04/08/22 | cover photo: Horst Friedrichs

№ 31 reading list: the letters of Bishop & Lowell

Adding Swann's Way to my last reading list (№ 30) was an excellent idea. I'm still reading Proust and cannot understand why I waited so long to read him. His rich prose requires slow reading and I find it best to read 8-10 pages at a time, preferably in the morning. I start my day by reading; I wake up very early with my son, who has to cross Linz and its suburbs by tram to get to school. When he leaves - most people are still asleep - I sit down with coffee, toast and books. These days I start with the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, with the letters they wrote to each other, before turning to Proust and other writers. My routine ends with whatever German fiction I'm reading at the moment.

№ 31 reading list:

1  Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop

and Robert Lowell  · edited by Thomas Travisano & Saskia Hamilton

2  Upstream: Selected Essays  · Mary Oliver
3  Speak, Memory  · Vladimir Nabokov
4  Personal History  · Katharine Graham
5  Ein ganzes Leben  · Robert Seethaler [German]

I'm still reading Der Untergeher (The Loser, № 30), my third book by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. He is such a witty storyteller. I want to read everything by him in German (I think most of his novels and plays have been translated into English). I have never read anything by his countryman Robert Seethaler and now it's time for Ein ganzes Leben which I bought last summer (A Whole Life, trans. by Charlotte Collins).

Cherry blossoms, Antwerp 2011

My current bedtime reading is Personal History, the memoir of the late Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. I started the book a long time ago but held off adding it to a reading list until now. I knew she had devoted many chapters to her family story and upbringing (it's the part of biographies that least appeals to me), so I wanted to get through them first. When her story finally took off I often found it hard to put the book down, but more on that in my next reading journal entry.

images mine, 01 and 03 appeared on Instagram 12/04/21 and 24/04/21

Reading journal: Virginia Woolf on books

Virginia Woolf sharing my own thoughts on books:

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in & found the table laden with books. I looked in & sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one* off & broaching it. I think I could happily live here & read forever.

She wrote these delightful words in her diary at Monk's House, Thursday 24 August 1933 (vol. 4, see № 29).

*The Confessions of Arsene Houssaye

image by me, appeared on Instagram 04/02/22