January has been a furniture buying month. In addition to a new dining table I bought this Danish teak bookcase that fits neatly in my hallway. About the only space left in my small apartment. At the moment it holds mostly my unread books which previously were stacked on every available surface in my place. It’s a relief to have these books organized in one spot and cleared from every other surface in my place!
I’ve been wanting to replace my well designed, but fixed Ikea step ladder with a folding one to better fit in my apartment. In a google search I came across the Lucano 2 step ladder from Hasegawa and luckily enough found a shop in Vancouver that sells them! It’s a brilliant marriage of form and function not to mention the strking colour. In my small apt where I lack a lot of storage space I wanted something that would look good when not in use while still being a visible object in the room.
I picked up two plays today. Volopone I only heard about for the first time recently but I can’t remember where! That’s going to really annoy me. Cyrano, I wanted to read because I’ve watched two film adaptations recently: The first one from 2022 directed by Joe Wright starring Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennett (very good btw) and the other is one the classic with Gérard Depardieu from 1990.
Currently reading: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 📚
I’ve never seen text formatted where a space is included before the apostrophe or in between the two words of a contraction, as you can see in “they ‘re” & “did n’t. Though for some reason “don’t” is written normally. I wonder is this a peculiarity of Jame’s writing that Modern Library have preserved? I don’t imagine it’s a Modern Library have a style guide that’s being imposed on the text.
Finished reading: The Pearl by John Steinbeck 📚
Finished reading: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo 📚
Great line from an Oliver Burkeman blog post:
this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).
Lovely Modern Library edition of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I picked this up following a thread from the novel Either/Or in which the author Elif Batuman spends some time talking about James and his novel.
