The Bronze Medal is glad you're here. Other places you can find Ryan are:
Flickr / Facebook / Twitter / Last.fm / Shelfari
He also likes mail - ryan [dot] gessner [at] gmail [dot] com

Read in 2009

Jose Saramago / Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Thomas Mann / The Magic Mountain
Mikhail Bulgakov / The Master and Margarita
Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing
Graham Greene / The Power and the Glory
Virginia Woolf / Mrs. Dalloway
Bill Davis / Mass Appeal
Chris Adrian / A Better Angel
Nam Le / The Boat
William Gass / Tests of Time
Haruki Murakami / Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Colson Whitehead / Sag Harbor
Karen Russell / St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Virginia Woolf / Orlando
Walker Percy / The Moviegoer
Michael Ondaatje / In The Skin of A Lion
Nicole Krauss / Man Walks Into a Room
James Joyce / Ulysses
Steig Larsson / Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Nicholas Christopher / A Trip to the Stars
Randall Jarrell / No Other Book
William Gass / Habitations of the Word
Thomas Pynchon / Inherent Vice
Lorrie Moore / Self Help
Clarice Lispector / Near to the Wild Heart
Italo Calvino / If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Aleksander Hemon / The Lazarus Project
Steig Larsson / The Girl Who Played With Fire
Sarah Hall / How to Paint a Dead Man
Dave Eggers / Zeitoun

8 November

7 notes  |  
Comments
  
Spotted at the British Natural History Museum: Fat Manatee, London Edition.

Spotted at the British Natural History Museum: Fat Manatee, London Edition.

5 November

7 notes  |  
Comments
  
National Gallery, London.

National Gallery, London.

3 November

6 notes  |  
Comments
  

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain.

— 

James Geary, On London

I’m leaving for London in mere hours and will be there for the next week. We have a sort of running list of things we want to see but no set timeline or agenda, which I think is the way to go. Who wants to be tied down to a set schedule in a city like London? Half the pleasure is in walking around, letting the place unfold itself before you as it will, and not as Fodor’s or Frommer’s or Lonely Planet has told you it will.


1 note  |  
Comments
  

The other day a patron asked me for a book with short overviews of all Dicken’s characters; she was participating in a local Dickens festival but did not have the time to actually read one of his novels. She said she was “pressured” into helping out with the festival. I wonder if she is worried about being exposed as an impostor?

Tags:   #undercover agent?

2 November

0 notes  |  
Comments
  

I just found out that when Holly Miranda opened for Florence + The Machine last week her backing band was Nada Surf.

If I had known that I would have screamed out for “Popular.”

Tags:   #information gleaned too late to be of use


4 notes  |  
Comments
  

The heart’s a sprinting thing and hammers fast.
The word is slow and rigid in its pace.
But, if they part once, they must meet at last
As when the rabbit and the tortoise race.
Words follow heartbeats, arrogant and slow
As if they had forever in their load,
As if the race were won, as if they go
To meet a dying rabbit on that road.
Then, step by step, the words become their own.
The turtle creeps to win the prize.
But, ah, the sweeter touch, the quicker boon
Is lost forever when the rabbit dies.

— Jack Spicer, Reading Last Year’s Love Poems


33 notes  |  
Comments
     
via paperbackgirl
(via paperbackgirl)
We’re doing another NYC Bookswap, autumn-style!

(via paperbackgirl)

We’re doing another NYC Bookswap, autumn-style!

Tags:   #books were made for swapping!


7 notes  |  
Comments
  

Right Now

I am in an all-day training called Black Belt Librarian. I’ll let you all use your imagination as to what it’s like.

Tags:   #I am not learning karate

1 November

4 notes  |  
Comments
  

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] 55  listens

Florence and the Machine - Postcards From Italy (Beirut Cover)

I don’t know what I’m going to do if I hear a good song while I’m in London this week and can’t post it to Tumblr that very day; or for that matter if I see something amazing and have to suppress my reblogging reflex , or if I see something completely ridiculous and have to stifle the urge to shout “unfollow.”


112 notes  |  
Comments
     
via liana
liana:

Wipe that stupid grin off your face, Griffith Observatory. You do realize you’re wearing a dodgeball on your head? Fantastic. All right, I’m cutting you off now. The astronomers disapprove.
(Costumier: Eric)

AMAZING!

liana:

Wipe that stupid grin off your face, Griffith Observatory. You do realize you’re wearing a dodgeball on your head? Fantastic. All right, I’m cutting you off now. The astronomers disapprove.

(Costumier: Eric)

AMAZING!


3 notes  |  
Comments
  

It is a bright afternoon: what am I going to do? I am going to work with my mind and with my pen, while the sky is clear and while the soft white clouds are small and sharply defined in it. I am not going to bury myself in books and note taking. I am not going to lose myself in this jungle and come out drunk and bewildered, feeling that bewilderment is a sign that I have done something. I am not going to write as one driven by compulsions but freely, because I am a writer, because for me to write is to think and to live and also in some degree even to pray…

— Thomas Merton, The Search for Solitude


3 notes  |  
Comments
  
Fall is the best…

Fall is the best…

Posts that have made me click the    button

See more stuff I like