booklovers unite!

Booklovers unite! You have nothing to (ab)use but your books! Today's essay at the back of the New York times book review is "Confessions of a book abuser" by Ben Schott. He talks about how he (ab)uses his own modern books. The illustration is eight stages in laundering Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence. He talks about marginalia and how valuable it is when it is. He doesn't however condone highlighting and tells an amusing story of someone who used a toxic highlighter and lost the important sentences, leaving only the irrelevant stuff.

Page 98 bookclub -- http://artcataloging.net/page98/page98cover.html -- is getting back together next week. We've not been meeting since last March because .... well, we just ran out of steam. Now we're regathering because we like each other and we like talking about books, sometimes the same one, sometimes not. Strangely, it was last March 5th when we last met. No assignment this time: we'll just talk about the book we most enjoyed in the last few months. We'll meet on the first Mondays of the month until it gets back into our thought-streams. My most memorable book was probably The story of the night by Colm Toibin. It's set in Buenos Aires and has a real sense of place.