books are a uniquely portable magic – S. King

hello friends, how are you on this wintery sunday night? i hope you’re cozy enjoying time to do the things you love. does it seems that there’s never enough time to do it all? why is it that the more efficient we get technologically, the less time we actually have? it rushes by so fast and life goes at the speed of light. what can we do to make time? i believe there is a way to slow it all down, something i neglected for awhile, what with the glamour and allure of the world on the touch screen. it’s the simple and timeless act of cracking a book.

‘Why Readers, Scientifically, Are The Best People To Fall In Love With”

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”
― Francois Mauriac

the distractions of tv and hand held devices seem to affect a lot of us in the same way. maybe it’s our curiosity for something new, that next image, article, (or potential date)! that keeps us glued to the phone. maybe our attention spans are shorter or we’ve just stopped carving out alone time to curl up in a chair to read.

“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
― Louis L’Amour

over the holidays my family gifted me with books and journals. it’s been a long time since we exchanged books and it was a really nice feeling to hold them and fall in love again. it sparked a pinterest search for an image of a woman reading and it revealed wonderful category of art that i never really thought about: the reader. for centuries, artists and photographers have been capturing men, women and children under the spell of a good book. turns out the ways we read are as varied as what we read.

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

i don’t want to do a lot of talking about it, i’ve got reading and writing to get to! but i wanted to share some of the images that came up and are bookmarked on my Pinterest Books Board.

it might be a fun to have some of these images together in a book and see what changes through the ages. the positions of the reader, their clothes, the decor, the hairstyles. what doesn’t change is a sort of quiet majesty we as viewers witness and we as readers understand. we read and we learn. we’re listening silently to another’s voice and are hearing a story that is so intimately shared from the page to the mind.

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”
― Carl Sagan

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”
― Henry David Thoreau

Franz Eybl – “Reading Girl” – 1850

Un soir d’été à Paris, Cuno Amiet, 1890

John White Alexander Repose, 1895

L. Kokamiagi.Winter.1977

Marguerite 1918 Poster by Guy Rose

Book Quotes

benefits-of-reading

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

Albert Samuel Anker, 1910

Woman Reading – Antoine Vincent French, b.1956

Carlton Alfred Smith, Storytime 1897

“Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.”
― Nicholson Baker

 

well it’s getting late and time to turn in. is there anything you’re reading now that you’d care to recommend? i’d love to hear anything you’re enjoying and how you make time to read in a busy world. sweet dreams!

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” 
― Toni Morrison