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.

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 done the wind, trees, the moon, rivers, and roads, but not the stars.   Of course, there are so many kinds of stars...blazing suns in the skies, people who have shone in their lives in every field, stars as destiny or fate.  

Star Poems are here:
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/...

Falling Stars
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall.

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 spring and so our thoughts turn to love.  

Love is a many splendored thing
It's the April rose that only grows in the early spring
Love is nature's way of giving a reason to be living
The golden crown that makes a man a king
Once on a high and windy hill
In the morning mist two lovers kissed and the world stood still
Then your fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing
Yes, true love's a many splendored thing

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

It is love of all kinds that has made us human and that has given us the courage to be the best we can be.  What would we be like without love and companionship from partners, parents, children, or pets?

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.

Despite all the books that list Atlantis as having been found in places all over the world and as much as that does fascinate me, it is not important to me to know if it really existed or not.  There is something deeper inside me, as with the King Arthur legends, that just needs to have an Atlantis to dream about, to imagine, to walk the streets of...thus the title...

There are many places that have been invented by authors as allegories and as classic stories that also grab my imagination.  I would like to hear about the ones that grab yours.

So what do you think about Atlantis?  Allegory, Legend, or Fact?

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 been watching and rewatching series one and two of Lovejoy with Ian McShane which I understand represents a lighter version of Lovejoy’s character than the one in the books by Gash that I have not read.

wiki says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...

Lovejoy is a series of picaresque novels by John Grant (under the pen name Jonathan Gash) about the adventures of Lovejoy, a British antiques dealer based in East Anglia whose scruples are not always the highest.

The definition for a rogue is here and Lovejoy perhaps would be number 3, for the most part, at least in the TV series.

http://onlinedictionary.datasegment....

3. One who is pleasantly mischievous or frolicsome; hence, often used as a term of endearment.

       1913 Webster

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.

Tonight, I am indulging myself with my love for dragons.

The most beautiful and most tragic book about a dragon and a lady is Dragondoom by Dennis L. McKiernan

For those who prefer other kinds of dragons, here is the Draco Constellation myth:

http://www.hawastsoc.org/...

The short story The Fifty-First Dragon by Heywood Broun is here and is a MUST read:

http://www.bartleby.com/...