Year: 2018
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On Organizing Books
At the age of twenty, I moved into my own place and brought a kitten, Gertrude, with me, who I had adopted two weeks prior to that big day, all of my belongings, and my collection of about three-hundred books. I packed them, carried them up four flights of stairs with the help of my…
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To Revisit and to Reread
It’s a strange feeling, one that makes you think that there’s something off, you’re not yourself. It’s a discomfort, a disconnect, being lost while not really being lost at all. Just as you can feel a cold coming on, the sniffles, the droopy eyes, the soreness in your throat, I can feel this “reader’s block”…
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"Underneath the stories": Dani Shapiro's Hourglass
There is something controversial about memory, especially when we think of it as being synonymous with truth and honesty. Can we rely on our memories like we rely on photographs or on diary entries? In a sense, they are all we have when we look back on moments in our lives and try to outline…
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The Elaborate and the Minimal: The Aesthetics of Book Cover Design
Before I sit down to write this, I make myself a cup of tea. I remove a tea bag from a small wooden box with a design on the side that looks like it may be an illustration from a Dickens novel, on another side, there is a large shamrock: Irish Breakfast tea. The mug…
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A Portrait of an Irish Town: Donal Ryan's The Spinning Heart
It was on my reading list two years ago for an Irish Literature course that I was taking in university. The two novels, Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Anne Enright’s The Wig My Father Wore, were assigned at the end of the semester. A time when stress-levels were high, Christmas was so close that all…
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A New Favourite: Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn
It was a Thursday morning. Guided by a tradition that had developed, unbeknownst to my Dad and I, over a few years, we were in the car driving to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. First, a visit to Ceres Bakery for breakfast and to pick up the six sticky buns that were tucked away in a box,…
Sydney K Erickson 