Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

The purpose of reading is to change and grow.  Good literature, good music, and good movies challenge us to change our view of the world.  We grow larger and stronger in spirit.  We accept that challenge when we pick up a good book, listen to music, watch a movie and enter into the world the creator of the work presents.

In long novels, the main characters also grow and change.  Watching this journey of the soul keeps us reading and makes the characters memorable.

That is why we can’t forget Natasha and Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  This is why we cannot forget Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.  This is why Jo Marsh lives in our hearts as created by Louisa May Alcott in Little Women.  

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

When my children were small and I hungered to talk with adults, I enjoyed reading Montaigne’s Essays because it seemed as if we were having a conversation as we sat together at lunch perhaps.  That kind of essay or journal writing that includes the reader is wonderful.

The front page story is terrible and important, but so is the Rescue Rangers' Diary.

Open Thread and Diary Rescue  
by Diary Rescue
http://www.dailykos.com/...

I am especially wishing to have you read it tonight because they rescued jimstaro's diary:

War on Terror? Criminal Terrorism!! The Rand Report  
by jimstaro
http://www.dailykos.com/...

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

Life is a journey as we know and so books generally are about journeys of the soul, of learning, of experience, of growth, of sharing what is found by the author as he travels the road that lies before him.  We find that our own life’s journey is on a path with many other pilgrims.  We are not alone.

Some of us do travel a different path and that is interesting, too.
 
As Henry David Thoreau said:

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

I was looking at two quotations by Abraham Lincoln and I thought how do we build character and how do we learn about liberty?  One answer is by reading difficult, painful, and courageously written books that make us grow.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

It is in the summer that we ask friends to think of books we should find to take to the beach or on an airplane.  Literary magazines and supplements like the NYT provide lists in all the genres.  Friends share their favorites.  Prize winning books are listed at wiki.

There are books about the kind of books that everyone in America should read.  There are sites where we discuss the top ten books we would take to a desert island.  I can never stop at ten.  I am not sure I can stop at one hundred.

I usually say that I hope the others who are on the desert isle with me will share their choices.  I promised plf that I would take Shakespeare's Collected Plays if limited to one book.  A whole world in one book is the attraction.

This will also be a short diary.  

I hope that you will check and rec the following diaries that are not short diaries... thank you.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

My theme tonight is stories and poems about "Impossible" adventures as told in books.  There are fiction and nonfiction journeys, dreams, memories and attempts to live a courageous life that have been recorded.  The stories that are mentioned, tonight, include memoirs, fiction, historical fiction, and scifi/fantasy.  Some have won prestigious awards.  

I will begin as far back as possible with a lament ... a cry of the heart...memories.
 
The Wanderer
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/...

The Wanderer is an Old English poem from the 10th century, preserved in the Exeter Book. The date of composition is unknown but most certainly predates 1070 AD, as it was probably part of an earlier, oral literary culture.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

I have visited Gettysburg three times in recent years and I hope to do so again.  I feel that somehow I am paying my respects to a terrible time and to all those who paid the price for that conflagration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...

The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1 – July 3, 1863), fought in, and around the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as part of the Gettysburg Campaign, was the battle with the largest number of casualties in the American Civil War and is frequently cited as the war's turning point...

The two armies began to collide at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, as Lee urgently concentrated his forces there. Low ridges to the northwest of town were defended initially by a Union cavalry division, which was soon reinforced with two corps of Union infantry.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

Rich books are creamy and full of content with layers of meaning and memorable characters.  They are authentic and reward us for careful reading.  They cause us to think and grow and to go looking for more information.  They teach us that we are not alone in the world community.  They enhance our spirits.  They help us to know who we are.  Following a gifted author through a luxuriant story is one of the wonders of life.

last week panicbean commented:

Reading is an art to me, read and take in the information, but ask yourself a question while doing so.  How does this apply to me?   How can I learn from this, and does it affect me or disaffect me.

http://www.dailykos.com/...

Indeed, that is what makes a reader stay with a book, to be engaged with it and with the author as a partner in discovery.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

The word incandescent popped into my mind the other night and I thought about it a bit trying to see how it connected to books and friendships.  I have already done a diary on love, but how about stories that showcase friendships?  

In Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Elizabeth’s sister, Jane, and a wealthy young bachelor named Mr. Bingley, begin a friendship that I think is incandescent.  It is ardent and Jane is luminous.  

In Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the unwise younger sister, Marianne Dashwood also begins an unfortunate and public friendship with Mr. Willoughby.  In the film directed by Ang Lee, Kate Winslet is incandescent.   In the first story, the young friendship triumphs, in the second, it fails miserably.  Yet, each friendship is unforgettable.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

All the seasons are invoked in books if we think of the metaphor of age.  Spring is the youth who is still unfolding and growing, summer is the ripe adult who seizes the hours and finds all activities to be glorious fun, fall is the time of the mature mind that reflects at last on all that has passed and what may yet come, and winter is that slower time when a person revisits the past and is both happy and surprised that it was lived so vitally.  

In books and plays we find characters in all seasons of their lives.  Sometimes in a large novel, the character begins as a baby and moves through the book to blaze out in the end as a wise elder.  In other stories, we see a character frozen in one period of their life.  

In the northern states summer is on everyone’s list of promises yearned for and at last fulfilled so tonight we will consider books set in the summer or the summer season of a character's life.  A few poems and quotes express the sheer joy of living in a summer country.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

I have to say before we begin, that the MOST memorable scene ever, happened in Minnesota last night.  

When we speak of unforgettable scenes, we are often speaking of plays or film.  In books, the most memorable scenes may be at the end where the build up of the story into ever increasing drama is finally resolved.  

In A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens we see the cart full of prisoners moving toward the platform of the guillotine and Sydney Carton whose last thought is, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."  

To tell the most memorable scenes in many books would be to give the ending away and spoil it as in Sophie’s Choice by Styron.  

Tonight, I want to discuss memorable scenes that occur earlier in the story that do not spoil it for other readers.  

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

When I left high school in 1962, I was pretty naïve about a lot of things.  College helped immensely, of course, and I loved it there and grew a lot in mind and spirit.  

With me, though, it was true that the more I learned, the more questions I had and that led me to buy and read books that had not been available in my small town library or school library.  

This poem was one of the first to really hit my heart and led to my reading and loving the work of other Black poets.

Merry-Go-Round

Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can't sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There's a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we're put in the back—
But there ain't no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where's the horse
For a kid that's black?

Langston Hughes

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

Usually, we talk about all the book genres at Bookflurries and you are welcome to talk about any book or play, tonight.  

One night, I featured mysteries and last week I promoted true stories so tonight I decided to do one of my favorite areas which is science fiction and fantasy.  As many readers did in the 60’s, I fell in love with Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and after that series, I moved through many other wonderful worlds.

When I was first married, I lived near bookstores of all kinds.  When we moved to a rural area, I no longer had such resources and the nearby small library could not provide this genre.  I was lucky to find the Science Fiction Book Club to keep me going.

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, quotes, words, magazines, and books on tape.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

I have read a great many books in my life and I own thousands, but every once in a while I am blessed to find a book that I can’t lay down.   I devour it.  If it is fiction that is great, especially when it makes me think and grow; and if it is a true story, I am often humbled and yet enlarged beyond belief.  

In these inspiring books, I get to visit a person or a world virtually that I could never visit personally.  Sometimes I find a book that makes my heart sing.  I was that lucky this week when I read Three Cups of Tea about Greg Mortenson by David Oliver Relin.