Category archives: Uncategorized

 

 

Literary nuns

I’m still not sure whether this bookshop belongs in the Amazing Bookshops Around the World series, but it certainly is remarkable. When Clemens and I were walking around some backstreets in Bologna looking for a place to eat (after we were refused in a place where we wanted to eat merely because Blink182 had once eaten there), a shop window caught my eye, it was full of books related to the Pope. I went to (and work in a) Catholic school, but Catholicism is not my thing at all and it makes me feel sort of uneasy. So there I was, staring at the Pope wondering whether Italian people are nuts when I looked into the shop and saw the till. A nun. A nun at the till. A nun working. Did you hear me? A NUN!!! I thought everything nuns ever did was run around from one church to another and teach little children. It appears I was wrong. I must say that not every book in the place was religious, but I didn’t dare to go in. A nun smiled at me when I took a photo. Maybe she thought I’m hot for Jesus.

 

 

 

 

Aramar + Mysterymoor Giveaway

 

2011: What I read

Like every year, here is the list of every book I finished last year. I didn’t make it to 50, but that’s okay, I’m pleased with my list. The ones I liked best are bolded, and two of those are re-reads. Can you guess which ones?

 

Auster, Paul – Invisible
Beecher Stowe, Harriet – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Boyne, John – The House of the Special Purpose
Capote, Truman – In Cold Blood
Chang, Jung – Wild Swans
Clarke, Jamie – Don’t You Forget About Me. Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes
Collins, Wilkie – The Woman in White
Coupland, Douglas – Generation X
Coupland, Douglas – Generation A
Cummings e. e. – Selected Poems
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Doherthy, Thomas – Teenagers and Teenpics. The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s
Foster Wallace, David – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Garland, Alex – The Beach
Gilmour, David – The Film Club
Giordano, Paolo – The Solitude of Prime Numbers
Golden, Arthur – Memoirs of a Geisha
Gora, Susannah – You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried: The Brat Pack, Their Films and Their Impact on a Generation
Gordinier, Jeff – X Saves the World
Hornby, Nick – High Fidelity
Ishiguro, Kazuo – When We Were Orphans
James, Henry – Portrait of a Lady
Johnson, Steven – Everything Bad Is Good for You
Kafka, Franz – America. The Man Who Disappeared
Karbo, Karen – How to Hepburn. Lessons on Living from Kate the Great
Kundera, Milan – The Farewell Party
Kureishi, Hanif – The Body
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
McEwan, Ian – Amsterdam
McNeil, Legs – Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Moran, Caitlin – How to Be a Woman
Morató, Cristina – Divas Rebeldes
Murakami, Haruki – 1Q84
N+1 – What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation
Oates, Joyce Carol – The Gravedigger’s Daughter
Roth, Philip – American Pastoral
Severgnini, Beppe – La Bella Figura.
Shary, Timothy – Generation Multiples. The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stockett, Kathryn – The Help
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Tropiano, Stephen – Rebels and Chicks. A History of the Hollywood Teen Movie
Vargas Llosa, Mario – Pantaleón y las Visitadoras
Vizzini, Ned – It’s Kind of a Funny Story
Winterson, Jeanette – The Stone Gods

 

If you feel that way inclined, you can see what I read in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

 

Animal Dreams

Hi! I am so honored to be writing for Mystery Moor. I discovered this little zone of coolness when I was bopping around the web. I live in Colorado, in the U.S., and write a lot about what it means to be making my way as a woman in the world, which lately has been a return to all things colorful, feminine, and artsy.

I came to what I think of as my feminine powers of creativity and poetry in high school, but they didn’t really cement until college, when I was on my own, somewhat lonely, and chock full of caffeine. I so appreciate Andrea’s paean to insomnia in her blog title, because so much mystery and magic happens in the hours of darkness between sundown and sunup. I mean, come on: that’s when the owl flies.

I used to live in the attic apartment of an old Victorian house where bats would sometimes squeeze in through a crack in the back room – the store/movie/meditation room that I had giant plans of making into a personal yoga studio. I bought the paint and everything but never got around to it. When we moved to a little bungalow a couple of streets away, my husband painted the kitchen with the paint I had bought. Now I make food and learn to lovingly feed myself and others in my sea-blue kitchen, floating with the intentions of that lost yoga space.

 

blue kitchen

Kara's pretty blue kitchen

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Look, it's another post about hating fashion.

I’m a girl. I like dresses and buying lipstick, being strangely colour-coordinated and retail therapy. Despite all this, I have found it nearly impossible to find anything I liked in shops this season. I don’t want to wear stupidly bright colours or look like I came straight from 90210 (the original series, none of this modern nonsense). So after some unfruitful shopping trips I went online to browse more clothing sites only to find that fashion this season does indeed suck big time. One more reason to dress in band tees and shorts all summer. And you know what? I’m okay with that.

Here are the few things I actually liked.
I actually own two of these items. Guess which ones?

 

2011: The first half

 

Q: Is twitter useful?

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A: I don’t know, but feel free to follow me here.

If somebody asked me how twitter works, how to use twitter, how to get more twitter followers or any other serious question related to this micro-blogging platform I honestly wouldn’t know how to answer.
I’ve found twitter useful in three occasions:
1. To buy a record before it sold out
2. To promote my blog/etsy shop
3. To contact someone who tweets from their phone whose number I don’t have
Other than that, I fear that everything I say gets sinks in a deep deep river of twitter bullshit. With all the crap that people (myself included) share all the time, I sometimes fear that my relevant tweets go unnoticed. Because, you know, sometimes I ask genuine questions that get less attention than people tweeting “I’m having pasta for dinner #win”.  So for the sake of posterity, here are some of my relevant tweets that I still want answers to.

 

Vintage Spanish Postcards