31/1001 - bookstore finds and Bradburian reading plan

 One of my kids had the brilliant idea to celebrate President's Day by visiting our favorite used bookstores. Thanks for being a force for good in the world, Madge!

•The Philosophy of Modern Art by Herbert Read

•The Selected Letters of John Keats

•The Collected Poems of Rupert Brook - the former owner wrote, "Gorgeous!!" and "Great!" in red felt pen above at least two poems, which convinced me to bring it home - yeah, Marginalia!

•The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan

•The Shock of Recognition, edited by Edmund Wilson - I'm really looking forward to reading some of this; the subtitle is "The development of Literature in the United States recorded by the man who made it." 

•Essays and Introductions by W.B. Yeats

•On Moral Fiction by John Gardner 

There are more collection of essays here than I typically buy. Since starting this 1001 Bradburian Nights reading plan, I've found that I really, really enjoy reading essays on pretty much anything. The form is exactly what I've been craving, so to speak, but had no idea I wanted until I started reading them daily.

This is my current favorite poetry book! Printed in 1947 and only 5 bucks. With lots of marginalia and this quote in the front cover:

"Make no mistake: modern poetry, at its best, is superb. Enormous emotion can be packed into properly allusive, taut, freshly visioned, freshly phrased poetry. It must not be so allusive that it becomes a mere logo machine puzzle, but it may speak it's own filed-precise idiom, to a limited audience, in such a way as to broaden not only the boundaries of life, but actualize life there." - Clement Wood

Short story: The Brave Little Tailor, a Grimm Fairy-tale

Essay: the first essay in Verlyn Flieger's book Splintered Light, on Tolkien's Silmarillion

Poem:

The Linnet

by Ralph Hodgson

They say the world's a sham, and life a lease

  Of nightmare nothing nicknamed Time, and we

Ghost voyagers in undiscovered seas

  Where fact is feign; mirage, reality:

Where all is vain and vanity is all,

  And eyes look out and only know they stare

At conjured coasts whose beacons rise and fall

  And vanish with the hopes that feigned them there:

Where sea-shell measures urge a phantom dance

  Till fancied pleasurc drowns imagined pain-

Till Death stares madness out of countenance,

  And vanity is all and all is vain.

It may be even as my friends allege.

  I'm pressed to prove that life iS something more-

And yet a linnet on a hawthorn hedge

  Still wants explaining and accounting for.

I want to go to the UK to see and hear the linnet. Yeats mentions it in at least two poems and I've read other early modern poets mention it, too.