Books on the Menu

A Book Shop in Istanbul

@brittarnhild

A day of city walking in Istabul.

We sat down for lunch out on the pavement, and while we were eating I spotted a book shop on the other side of the street.

While the rest of my group ordered Turkish coffee, I ran over the street and had my "coffee" in the book shop. The young book seller had great advices to give, and though I had planned to buy only one book, I ended up with three.

The Bastard of Istanbul, by Elif Shafak

A Memento for Istanbul, by Ahmet Ümit

Portrait of a Turkish Family, by Ifran Orga

I will let you know more about the books later.

 

Encountering the Mystery

@brittarnhild

I am traveling to Istanbul today. A work trip with the deans and the administrative leaders in my diocese where I work. During our stay we will meet His All Holiness Bartholemew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. I have meet His Holiness before. 10 years ago we took part in a sailing together, along the coast of Norway, focusing on sustainability and the environment. His Holiness is also called The Green Patriarch.

For the moment I am reading one of His Holiness´books;
Encountering the Mystery. Understanding Ortodox Christianity Today.

It is too early to write much about the book yet as I have read only one chapter.
But this first chapter, about icons, has already inspired me to use ideas from it when I have the morning paryer for the group I am traveling with on Sunday morning.

 

The first chapter already inspired me to write a blog post in BrittArnhild´s House in the Woods yesterday, My Sacred Icons. Comments on the post are helping further on in my reflections.

 

 

I am reading the book in Norwegian, but it is also available in English.

 

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I don´t know yet if I will be able to post from Istanbul. Hopefully I will.

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Today´s photos are from Hong Kong.

 

Colours

@brittarnhild

I dream in colours. For most of my life I have believed that everyone does, until a  friend told me that all her dreams were in black and white. I have always loved colours, loved their purity, loved their mix.

When I was in 4th grade I wanted to knit a pair of socks. This was a real challenge as my classmates were still struggling with potholders. I had learned to knit by my mother and my two grandmothers, and already knew a lot more than knit & purl. In the class room there were baskets filled with yarn, and I picked out a dark blue and an olive green. When I went to the teacher to show her my choice, I couldn´t believe my ears when she told me I could not knit with those two colours. "blue and green do not go together"

I don´t remember which colour my socks ended up in, but I know that from that day on blue and green together are my favorites! Can you imagine anything more beautiful than a deep blue sky and a green river, green fields and green and blue mountains?

In High School I was knitting my father a sweather. Grey, with white and pink stripes. A girl told me - why, you can´t use these colours for your father! Pink is not for men!

My father loved the sweather!

Some time in 2003 I was in Stavanger for a work meeting. In a small Narvesen (kind of 7eleven) a book caught my interest:

Colour. Travel Through the Paintbox
by Victoria Finlay

I picked up the book, started to read, and since then I have been reading it!
Not because it is a slow read, but because I am reading it over and over all the time.

Last spring I met the author, and now my book has a writing in black ink on one of its first pages:
Dear Britt Arnhild.
For someone who loves colours as much as I do!
Victoria Finlay, Bath  

Looks like Victoria knows me. Yes, I love colours. And when I wrote my book about Lent and Lental traditions a few years ago, the rainbow and a colour calendar were important elements.

Victoria´s book is now on Folio,
but for some reason I am not able to find a seller who will skip it to Norway :-(((
How I would love to have the folio edition on my coffee table.

But I do have my paperback from 2003, which I will continue to read on and on.

 

 

From the back cover of the book:

Colour tells the remarkable story of Victoria Finlay´s quest to uncover the many secrets hidden inside the paintbox. On her travels she visited remote Central American villages where women still wear skirts dyed with the purple tears of sea snails; learned how George Washington obsessed about his green dining room while he should have been busy with matters of state, and investigated the mystery of Indian Yellow paint, said to have been made from the urine of Indian cows force-fed with mango leaves.
From mascara to violin varnish, from nomadic carpets to stained glass to pillar boxes to crayons, the story of colour is the story of the efforts of artists and artisans to reproduce the rainbow - and the impact their work has had on the world.

 

 

After Colours Victoria Finlay has written another book; Jewels.
I love this one almost as much as Colours.

 

I met Victoria earlier this summer. She had the most lovely necklace in black and silver. When I commented on it she told me; this is jet.

and since I´ve read Jewels I knew exactly what jet is :-)

 

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today´s pictures are from Tenerife

and you can read about my remarcable meeting with Victoria Finlay here

Travel Writing

@brittarnhild

Another travel is coming up, this time a week in Istanbul. I am leaving on the first plane Saturday morning, via Amsterdam, so I don´t need to start filling my black suitcase with the orange ribbons untill tomorrow. Tonight I am preparing my travel journal.

After trying out many different types of travel journals, I have ended up with black moleskins, the best ones, with the paper actually meant for water colours.

I plan to write more about my travel journals in tomorrow´s BrittArnhild´s House in the Woods, so I must not get carried away. This post is meant to be about a few books which I find helpful, inspirational, in my own travel writing process.

As this blog unfolds, you will get to know hundreds of travel books, some of them I read again, and again all the time, others have been read once and now cherished behind glass in my special bookcases for travel writing, others are still wiaiting to be read.

But let me come to the point.......I´ve had a long day at work today, and when I came home we had the "tree felling drama.....", so I am a bit tired :-)

The two books on travel writing and travel photography I am reading/studying for the moment are:

 

Lonely Planet´s Travel Writing, actually a gift from Jane and Lanny, blog readers who live in California, Jane and Lanny write the most remarcable travel letters themselves when they travel, which the do alot, and email them to family and friends, we are lucky to be on the list.

 

And Lonely Planet´s Guide to Travel Photography

 

 

Photos, from my travels around the world:
1 - aqua alta on St.Mark´s square, Venice, Italy
2 - Alhambra in Granada, Spain 
3 - Tenerife, Spain
4 - Yosemite, California, USA
5 - glass artist Mauro, Venice, Italy 
6 - Visitor at Hotel La Fenice, Venice, Italy (one of my favorite travel photos)
7 - blogging friend in Vienna, Austria 

 

Completely to Pieces

@brittarnhild

Right in front of my desk in my Blue Studio there is a window, and, as the roof is pitched, the wall is high, and over the window I have a book shelf, made many years ago by my husband. This shelf contains some of my favorite books, and if you come here to have a look you will, among my favorites, find a book which is read completely to pieces. It is a paperback, it is old and the glue on the book´s back has dried up and the papers are loose. Common sense tells me to throw away the book, but though the pages are loose, threatening to fly their own ways. The words on the pages are still there though, and the words contain dreams. Dreams which take me around the world on butterfly wings.

The book came flying to The House in the Woods back in 2004, and since then it has been read over and over. And again and again I have taken it with me on my world wide travels - to England, to India, to Syria, to Italy, to Nepal, to Tenerife, to Madeira.....and next week I plan to take it to Turkey.

The book I am talking about is
Love Among the Butterflies, The diary of a wayward determined and passionate Victorian lady, Margaret Fountaine.

Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940) wrote and draw diaries all her life, and she collected butterflies, ten thousands of them.

After her death, according to her will, 10 mahogany display cases with 22,000 butterflies were handed over to the Castle Museum in Norwich. With the butterfly cases was also a sealed and padlocked black japanese books "some two feet long by a foot wide and a foot hight, contained in a strapped cover of heavy canvas" This box, said her will, contained manuscripts which should not be opened untill 15 April 1978.

When the date came and the box was finally opened, it tured out that the manuscripts were Margaret Fountaine´s diaries, from the first one she started at age 16, till the last one finished only a few months before she died.....

 

The rest of the story can be read in the book :-)))

Margaret´s writing might not be the best, well, at least I have heard some people say that. I LOVE it. Or is it the dream of a Victorian lady spending a life traveling the world in search of butterflies I love! Yes, I LOVE that as well.

And I will continue to read the butterfly wing pages, and bring it with me around my world.

After Turkey comes Ethiopia.......

 

Today´s photos are from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong,
from the autumn of 2012.

 

 

 

Natascha Scott-Strokes has written a book about Margaret Fountain, which in by Blue Studio bookshelf always is places side by side with Margaret´s own book.

 

And one more book is making the two others company, a rare, old book which is not on amazon:
The Butterflies on the British Isles, by Richard South, F.E.S. from 1906. Hardbound in blue leather, with several inscriptions, among them a piece of paper glued on the first page which writes:
Dame Allen´s Baoys´School Library. Presented by D. Young (1950-1955). A book with hundreds of colour illustrations of butterflies. A cheerished treasure in my House in the Woods library.

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Oh my! The world of books!
The world of reading!

 
 

 

I am starting a new book tonight

@brittarnhild

So many book suggestions comes from my blog readers. I love to get them and I love buying and reading the books suggested. I know I should use the library more, but first, I don´t recommend reading library books with a pen, and second, too few book at our great public libraries here in Norway are in English, which limits the books available too much.

Some few weeks ago Fran, in England, wrote me and email. One of the books she mentioned in her email cried my name out load, and as soon as I had finished reading Fran´s words, I found myself knocking on heaven´s  amazon´s door. The next week Tilly Culme-Seymour´s Island Sommers. Memories of a Norwegian Childhood was in my mailbox.

I am going to start the book tonight :-)))

 

:-))) means BIG smile :-)))

 

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Photos: Northern Norway, over Vestfjorden in late May

 

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I think Fran knows about my deep love for small islands,
and (the secret) that I am working on an island book myself :-) 

 

The Far Traveler, Voyages of a Viking Woman

@brittarnhild

I don´t plan this to be a daily blog, though I have enough books that inspire to post daily for a lifetime :-) It might be weekly posts, may be more often, may be less. But now in the beginning I am so excited to have this blog started, I can´t help another blog post already today.

And the book on the menu today is the one I have on my night stand for the moment, The Far Traveler, Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown.

I found the book in a bookstore in Reykjavik, Iceland in April, and knew it would be the perfect book for me.

Not an ordinary travel book, like those by Dervla Murphy, Freya Stark or Frances Mayes, where the traveler tells her own story, this one is about Gudrid, an Icelandic woman, a Viking woman, who lived and traveled about 500 years before Columbus. Gudrid is mentioned several times in the Icelandic Sagas, and the author has made it her goal to find out as much as possible about the remarcable woman.

 

One way of doing this is to travel to Iceland "joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid´s steps on land and in the sagas" (from the back cover of the book)

I have only read a bit more than 50 pages yet, of 264, and I am hooked. The biggest problem though is that I am so dead tired when I go to bed, I only manage a few pages and then I am fast asleep.

The good thing is:
the book will last me a long time :-)

 

 

Unfortunately amazon.co.uk wouldn´t let me link to the page of the book though a picture, but try clicking on this link instead. 

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The pictures are of me exploring the Waterfalls at Seljaland, on South Iceland

 

Charleston, a Bloomsbury house & garden......and a little of my own place as well

@brittarnhild

Some books you don´t have to search for, they find you. Quentin Bell, Virginia Nicholson and Alen Macweeney came to me that way. Almost out of the blue it found The House in the Woods from amazon.co.uk, where I buy most of my books, and as soon as I opened the brown bookpack (the amazon cardboard packs are the best chocolate I know), I knew that I was in for a treat. No, I was in for several treats, a bag full.

  

Saturday I was sitting out on our cabin terrace. A perfect day with a perfect sun. Charleston a Bloomsbury house and garden was laying on the table in front of me, and I hesitated to open it. It looked too good to be true. I was hoping it would take me on an Alladin carpet, to another time, another world, a world of magic.

Slowly I opened the book, and already while reading the preface my pen came handy. I always read books with a pen or a pencil, I make dog ears as well. I know the book appreciates it, it wants to show the world that it is loved and cherished.

Charleston, the house in Sussex where Vanessa Bell had her base, lived there all year round part of her loife, used it as a summer house other parts. The book is written by Vanessa´s son Quentin Bell, and her granddaughter, Quentin´s daughter, Virginia Nicholson.

For many years in my mind, Vanessa Bell lived in the shadow of her famous sister Virginia Woolf. I have read and reread Virginia Woolfs books, I have cried because of the sad way she died, I have read some more of her books.....and then, a few years ago, I found Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers, a book about the two sisters, and I realised that Virginia had a very interseting sister.

Charleston a Bloomsbusy house & garden reveals to me more of Vanessa Bell´s life, but even more it tells me about a lost world, a world of artists and an inconvetional way of living. Where your life, your oppinion, your likes and dislikes are important, make sense.

A house and a garden decorated on a whim, by artists who wanted to surround themselves with what they liked, wrapping themselves in art flowing from their heart and souls, no matter what "everybody else" liked or disliked.

As my reading hours went by, my heart sang, and I told myself.......oh, how I would like a Charleston, a house and a garden worth a book a hundred years from now......

 

..........then my heart sang a little more, and while listen closely I could figure out the words........look around you, you already have this house, you already have this garden, you even already have a cabin with the most amazing view you can imagine.....and a book in a hundred years? Why, when you live now and your house already has Britt-Arnhild´s House in the Woods. Forget that your girls find your house, your home oldfashioned, deep inside you know that they love it. Forget that your husband from time to time despair because of your uncountable collections and thousands of books, you know that he loves you and this love includes everything you love!

It didt take me long to sing along!

 

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An afterword:
I posted one of this photos on instagram, and got this message from jud_beb (Judith Railton), a true kindred spirit: when we  went to see Charleston my daughter said "now I understand our house".

 

Judith, one day I will come to GB to visit Charleston, and then I will take a detour to your house as well :-)

 

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Here is the book:

 

 

and here is the one about Vanessa and Virginia

 

 

 

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Oh, I almost fogot; Charleston and its life reminds me so much of what I am reading in A.S Byatt´s The Children´s Book. Have you read it? A.S.Byatt is one of my favorite writers :-) I am reading The Children´s Book for the third time just now, this time on my kindle. With Charlestonin my mind I have some fresh images for my reading.

 

Ready to start.

@brittarnhild

Often it is not easy to know where inspiration comes from. But this time I know exactly where and why. I was sitting out at the cabin terrace earlier today, reading Istanbul: The Collected Traveler, An Inspired Companion Guide, edited by Barrie Kerper, preparing for an upcoming trip to Istanbul. On page 214, where Kerper writes an introduction to Brian Lavery´s article about Orhan Pamuk, I read:
......Pamuk is by all accounts, a true bibliophile. It´s been said of him that his source of inspiration is more litterature than life, and his reading is encyclopedic......

But, that´s me, I almost said out load, and in the same moment I knew that a new blog was born;

 
Books on the Menu

 
a blog where I will share with you why books are of such immense inspiration. 

 

I don´t know how often I will post, and I have not set up any list of books I will share, but I can feel the ideas are flowing. And hopefully tomorrow the first book post will be here.

 

 

I am looking forward to share this love of books with you.