Blue Forest Bookshop & Collectables

Dave Pepler

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

Virginia Woolf

Have you ever written a letter to the author(s) you most admire? Did you send it? Did you receive a response?

If so, tell us your story! 💌

For the birthday of Langston Hughes - a reminder to open your arms and share love:

PBS Books

Look beneath the skin, rather than judging on outward look alone.

Awesome Librarians

Feeling readgret? 📚

Nora Roberts speaks out after attacks on casting of Alyssa Milano in adaptation

theguardian.com The bestselling novelist says she is ‘sincerely appalled’ by some readers’ anger at news that the #MeToo activist will star in a Netflix adaptation of Brazen Virtue

Napoleon’s manuscript on victory at Battle of Austerlitz goes on sale

theguardian.com Dictated account of military success in 1805 contains several corrections made by the exiled French leader

The Reader's Sunday Morning:
Lazy canine reading-companions, fuzzy blankets, soft birdsong in celebration of the rain and the immersive fantasy of Robin Hobb.

This is the definition of unadulterated idyll. 🐦

What are you reading today?

The 10 Most Intriguing, Rare (And Valuable) Books In The World

robbreport.co.uk You’ll be astounded that some still exist…

Leon Strydom: Fynproewer, hengelaar, letterkundige en kunsleier tot die einde | LitNet

litnet.co.za "Hy was ’n afgeronde, belese en bekroonde akademikus en digter, maar dit was veral vir sy werk as kunskenner dat hy bekendheid verwerf en talle rigtinggewende kunstenaars ’n platform gegee het."

“For a detained patriot, breaking through the doubled walls of gray silence, attempting even a symbolic link with the outside world, is an act of resistance. And resistance--even at the level of merely asserting one's rights, of maintaining one's ideological beliefs in the face of a programmed onslaught--is in fact the only way political prisoners can maintain their sanity and humanity. Resistance is the only means of trying to prevent a breakdown. The difficulty lies in the fact that in this effort one must rely first and foremost on one's own resources (writing defiance on toilet paper for instance), and nobody can teach one how to do it.”

Happy 83rd birthday to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o!

[Photo credit: Daniel A. Anderson]

Karin Slaughter

Punny

PRELUDES

[Because reading T.S. Eliot is one of my favourite ways to embrace the Monday-melancholia.]

I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Pieter-Dirk Uys's New Year whispers

New Year wishes are traditional, sometimes funny and usually well-mannered and well-meant. When I think about the upcoming year, only one word elbows itself into the foreground: Help! And that's not helpful because no one can help. Everyone's story is different, and yet we're all in the same boat.

The ocean liner of habit has sunk, ruptured by an invisible C-19 torpedo. And if we now look forward to a 'new normal', is 'normal' the right lifejacket? And what is new? To embrace again? Just to touch again? Even to enjoy a good sneeze without the rest of the room escaping through the open window in terror?

A year ago - which feels like a million hours in the past - we celebrated the end of 2019. South Africa's tyres were flat, its economic air captured. The usual suspects now have names, posing with their booty on front pages and Facebooks, their middle fingers erect and unsubtle. A former leader zumas from court to headline and back, while across the equator in the White House, an orange nightmare edges a paralysed democracy closer to the cliff of Fascism. As with the endings of all other years, we will prefer to look forward over the hump of Christmas, through the donga of early January to the beginning of the rest of our lives. All problems can be solved, but only tomorrow.

Covid-19 sounds like a space ship from a Hollywood horror, with nameless scattered dead, while Schwarzenegger and Streep hold their breaths to find the ultimate solution. A vaccine! Happy ending! Sorry darling, only in the flicks! Who could have guessed that the world we know and love could vanish overnight? Every day now just feels like another Tuesday. Christmas was a plastic tinselled made-in-China tree lying on its side in the back window of the car, as a good cheer shared with a world behind masks.

Tweeting #HappyNewYear is a good hashtag, but nothing is as hopeful as a 'Healthy Tomorrow'. So swop the crowd for just a few behind the same door of isolation. Zoom your love and care across veld and oceans, and know that social distance makes a life last longer.

Wishes for the rest of this new year are difficult, because 2021 is still just a pinprick of light at the end of a long and dark curved tunnel. My small torch of optimism cannot illuminate that far, maybe just to what we still call tomorrow. So yes, the sun will rise and shine and set. Yes, the birds will sing and fly. Yes, the dog and cat must be fed. Yes, all those things are still normal. Except us. Too many empty chairs round too many tables in too many homes.

My 2021 diary, usually so crammed with plots and plans, is empty. Every week's white page without scribbles or scrawls, is so shockingly bright that I need sunglasses to hide the tears. After nine months of this forced separate development, I now don't want to venture past that locked door, secretly in love with my isolation. My own bout of Stockholm Syndrome?

Oh my goodness, I nearly forgot my New Year wishes to you all. Okay, just that one word: Help. Help yourself. Help your family. Help your community. Help your friends. And do it calmly, day by day. Don't let news break over you. Next week is gossip; next month could be fake news. Try to feel better in 2021. You're not alone.

Bookstr

Looks like I have a new title to give to myself when people ask me to describe myself! 😆
Check out more posts like this on our Insta! https://bit.ly/36jPmMg

✨ Please note: We will be closing at 14:00 this afternoon, and will be closed tomorrow - 1 January 2021.

We would like to wish you all a new year that is filled with magic, beauty, connection, love, health, good music and an abundance of brilliant reading material!
May you be blessed - and may you always have enough shelf space for more books. ;)

HAPPY NEW YEAR! ❤

(Featured below: Yesterday's arrivals 🤩)

Usually, we would have been open today.
But we are closed - and this is why:

Today marks the greatest celebration of our lives. Five years ago our daughter, Iris Grace, burst into this world with a strength and compassion that has - and will continue to - change it for the better.
Five years ago we received the best Christmas gift we ever could - the gift of parenthood.

Many of you have shared this journey with us.
She has heard your voices from the warmth of my belly. She has smiled at you from the comfort our arms.
You have seen her go from crawling to walking. And then to running.
You have watched her unpack and stack books.
You have heard her laugh, you have seen her cry. And many of you have listened to a lesson on dinosaurs, and heard her dreams about becoming a paleontologist.
You have carried us, her parents, through moments of sheer exhaustion, or our time of fear and trauma following her snake-bite.

You have showered us with gifts and hugs - at the prologue to her birth, and straight through every chapter of our lives thus far.
Your support of our business has been vital in building this little family.
We could not thank you enough.
It takes a village - and our village with you, our family, means more than we could ever express.

We are so proud, and so blessed.
We look forward to writing the chapters still to come.
Please join us in wishing this little dinosaur a happy birthday.

Have a beautiful day today, and may your Christmas be magical.
We will see you again on Monday, 28 December. 🌻✨

🎄✨ Some of yesterday's new arrivals! 🤩

REMINDER:
We will be closed tomorrow (24 December), and will only re-open on Monday, 28 December.

Got any last minute Christmas shopping to do for the book-lovers in your family?

Better get here soon!
We are open until 16:30 this afternoon. ❤

On this day in 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky and several other members of the intellectual group, the Petrashevsky Circle, faced the firing squad for allegedly 'subversive' activities.
Their lives were spared by a last-minute stay of execution.

In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky would later say:

"There the sentence of death was read to all of us, we were told to kiss the cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and our last toilet was made. Then three were tied to the pillar for execution. I was the sixth. Three at a time were called out; consequently, I was in the second batch and no more than a minute was left me to live."

🌲✨ A bumper-sized photographic tour through ALMOST every section of the Blue Forest Bookshop 🤩
Is there any place more festive than this?

Now,
whether you need to stock up on those last-minute Christmas gifts,
entertain your guests who cannot visit the beach,
keep the children occupied and learning,
or,
simply escape the dire news, anxiety and uncertainty attached to our current global situation...
We've got you SAFELY covered!

🌲 We will be CLOSED from Thursday, 24 December until Sunday, 27 December.

On Monday, 28 December, we will reopen from 09:00 to 16:00.

Stay safe, and have a blessed festive season! 🎄✨

Carl Sagan on the Power of Books and Reading as the Path to Democracy

brainpickings.org “Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”

Author Ian Lahey

ilahey.com/books
Ebooks make trees even happier!

[12/16/20]   Yes, we are OPEN until 13:00 today!

"Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing."
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Today we meditate on the importance of honest dialogue, the responsibility of an openness to listening, a willingness to learn and our capacity for empathy as a few of the vital cornerstones in cultivating true reconciliation.

This small, diverse display of books should serve as a reminder of the tools available to each of us to learn, understand, initiate honest discourse and be motivated in each step we take toward unity, tolerance, love and reconciliation.
Books should never be underestimated in their capacity to change our perceptions of this world, and to build community.

We challenge you to learn about our country and the people who inhabit it. Learn about a culture different to your own. Learn one of our eleven official languages. Learn about our beautiful indigenous fauna and flora.
Learn outside of a vacuum of personal comfortability. Suspend your assumptions.
And then talk. Listen. Learn more. Unlearn. Teach. Share.

It is our collective responsibility. And our stories will see us through.

Have a blessed, and conscious Reconciliation Day.

John le Carré, author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, dies aged 89

theguardian.com Thriller writer most famous for stories of complex cold war intrigue began his career as a real-life spy in postwar Europe

Maks Viktor Antiquarian Books

Book Worms

[12/08/20]   Books. MORE BOOKS! 🤩

Every minute spent in the Blue Forest feels like Christmas-morning. 🎄❤

A Beatle’s reading list: John Lennon’s favourite books

It was on this day, forty years ago, that John Lennon was gunned down outside his Manhattan apartment.

Here is a list of some of the books that helped shape the man who would go on to remind us to "Give Peace a Chance":

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lennon-beatles-favourite-books-reading-list/

faroutmagazine.co.uk Wonderful reads

Rilke on What It Really Means to Love

brainpickings.org “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

Awesome Librarians

Happiness 📚

Goodwill Librarian

“I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”
― Frida Kahlo

Whether you're an artist, or just appreciative of the realms of colour; our new arrivals in art books will allow you to paint the realities of your choosing!

"Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it's true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.”
- James Baldwin

The Psychology of the Physical Bookstore Experience

"The bookstores that have survived, and thrived, have gone beyond the book. If you had to distill their product down, it would be this: an experience which exudes a love of books.

Whether, and how, small bookstores will survive through the pandemic is still uncertain. From a business standpoint, the pandemic must have seemed like a cruel joke. The "love of books" experience was their key differentiator that allowed them to survive (and in some cases thrive) during the Amazon era. And with COVID-19, it quickly became the one thing they couldn’t do.

But if the last 20 years of upheaval has taught us anything, it's this: People love the bookstore experience."

psychologytoday.com Can a unique psychological feeling be the savior of the bookstore?

English Literature