the little seamstress 🪡📚

ideas for Dickensian cat names - a thread (#1)🧵🎩😼 for the haughty feline: Lady Dedlock

I actually think life was better when the internet was on a computer, and during the long hours when you weren't logged in you grew bored and started making sketches or writing stories or grabbed a book at random from the shelf and disappeared into some other world.

My 12yo son is begging me for a phone, but he got so bored this summer that he went to the bookshelf and pulled off a copy of the Iliad, asked me if it was any good, and has been reading it for the last three days. Not helping his case.

I've just spent three days on holiday at the sea-coast and I'm sorry to say I completely get why Victorian doctors prescribed trips to the sea for the nerves.

please gift BOOKS to the children in your lives! and regularly ask them what they’re reading, what they liked or disliked about a book etc. it’s on us to foster a sense of curiosity about the world and the diff perspectives and stories that lie within it

reading was such a cornerstone of my childhood, so it breaks my heart that fewer children are reading for fun :( and will thus never experience the exhilaration that comes with staying up past your bedtime bc you can’t put a good book down

An overlooked reason why a lot of people are miserable in the modern era is because we’re so divorced from the natural world. Many of us never encounter mountains, forests, fens, rivers. Screens can’t be our whole lives. Books and nature cure a great many ills.

Today's library find: The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, by Edith Holden. These were seasonal notes made for her students in 1906 and never intended for publication. She fell into the Thames whilst gathering chestnut buds in 1920 and died aged 48.

Good day, dear Bibliophiles✨ art by Beatrix Potter #BookChatWeekly

There's no feeling like the joy of having a rummage at a library book sale and finding a hidden gem (in this case Ibn Battatu's Travels in Asia & Africa 1325-1354) for only a dollar. What would we do without libraries?

Harold Bloom; the best place for a child is in the library

As the university system collapses and millions succumb to tech-induced brain rot, the concept of the autodidact—a self-educated person who loves learning for its own sake—will become more important than ever. Read widely. Form study groups. Let the library be your college.

Ray Bradbury; the only way to live is to live with enthusiasm

I read thirty books in June (not all of them pictured): a history of ancient Rome, an Indian epic, a truly bizarre Victorian classic, a famous diary, several plays, an epistolary novel about books, and loads more. A thread of my favorites:

I'm begging everyone who hasn't yet to read this book. The premise, about a man living in an infinite house, is terrifically inventive, and it goes in a direction you don't expect. No other living author writes with such a keen sense of horror & beauty. The book of the decade.

it feels so good to give a piece of clothing a longer life by repairing the holes, the tears & imperfections (below: my little embroidery practice on a friend's broken waistband)

I wrote an essay reviewing and ranking my eighty-five FAVORITE books from thirty years of reading - the plays, poems, mysteries, fantasies, diaries that have shaped me. Please tell me in the comments which books I missed. (link below)

I hear this all the time. “Why are you reading on the subway? You should be scrolling like the rest of us!” There’s no such thing as performative reading. It’s good to read in public, good to read books you enjoy. Don’t let anyone shame you for seeking to broaden your mind.

Spotted on the Tube just now: man in mid-20s deeply lost in Canto V of Dante, across the way a woman a few years younger reading Mill on the Floss. Both in hard copy. There is hope!