Reading
Oh, the places you’ll go!
Into the west, beyond the hundredth meridian.
To the Finland station, PrairyErth, Istanbul, Alexandria,
The pillars of Hercules,
The lost heart of Asia.
Paris 1919, Gothic Europe,
The ancient Mediterranean,
The lost civilizations of the Stone Age.
The tree where man was born.
With thanks to the authors of the books: Theodor Seuss Geisel, Walter Nugent, Wallace Stegner, Edmund Wilson, William Least Heat-Moon, Orhan Pamuk, E. M. Forster, Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, Margaret MacMillan, Sacheverell Sitwell, Michael Grant, Richard Rudgley, and Peter Matthiessen.
I love these! Such an unusual idea, but with true poetry as the result . . .
Now I’m wondering whether you’re familiar with A Winter Book by Tove Jansson—one chapter, ‘Messages’, is created entirely out of tiny extracts from letters and notes, building up a beautiful snapshot of a moment in someone’s life.
Thank you!
I didn’t know about A Winter Book, but I’ll read it at my earliest opportunity. I read and loved one of Jansson’s Moomin books and two of her non-Moomin books, and that chapter you describe sounds wonderful. The idea of a sort of written mosaic is so interesting!
It’s beautifully done—she intersperses fragments of letters from publishers and readers with notes from her partner as they prepare to leave their island retreat for the winter. A lot of them finish mid-sentence, just including the few words she needs to paint the image.
I discovered the Moomin books when I was about 8 and have loved them ever since, so it was an absolute delight to discover she’d written for adults too.