#katherine rundell

[owllooker]

Has anyone read Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell?

I got really inspired to design the main characters: Christopher and Mal (and griffin Gelifen <3)

#idk what they put in that book but it really made me wanna draw #digital illustration #character design #fiction book #book illustration #digital art #my art #impossible creatures #Katherine Rundell

[beguines]

Donne's mind was cacophonous. His relentless imagination was his single most constant feature; he wrote about his "worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptique immoderate desire of humane learning". In his darker moments, it tortured him. His mind had ceaselessness built into it. It was to be, throughout his life, a site of new images, new theology, new doubts: even those who disliked his work acknowledged that he was a writer who had erupted through the old into the new. A contemporary wrote that, with him, it was "the lazy seeds / of servile imitation thrown away / and fresh invention planted".

But the always of that imagination must have been exhausting. For a mind like that, sex—real sex, true sex—would allow a singleness to hush the multitudinous mind. It's why so much of Donne's imagery around sex is so totalising: the man and woman become one, the woman becomes a state, a country, a planet. Sex, for Donne and those like him: permission, for those who watch the world with such feverish care, to turn one person into the world and to watch only them. It was a transforming of his constant seeking for knowledge. To adore and to devour and to be devoured is its own kind of focus: a gasp of a different kind of oxygen.

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

#katherine rundell #super-infinite #john donne

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

#the wolf wilder #katherine rundell #book poll #middle grade #have you read this book poll #polls

[itslookingback]

relevant to your Mole Interests:

there is a lovely book exploring different incredible animals around the world called "the golden mole" written by katherine rundell. each chapter focuses on one animal and all the special things about it and also human history around it. it's just a very nice book and i think mole interested people would love it :)

#mole interest #the golden mole #golden mole #katherine rundell #blue squawks

[vashhanamichi]

Language makes demands. It is an excavatory skill; each word needs to have its surface dusted, to see if below there is gold or snakes. Those who do not understand that language was multi-layered and subtle — those who read it lazily, who failed to imagine the demands it daily makes — deserved very little in return.

— Katherine Rundell, Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

#katherine rundell #super infinite: the transformations of john donne #john donne

[cloud--atlas]

"Listen. I need you to tell people this; I need you, when you get back, to tell them: the brutality is terrible. And yes: the chaos is very great. But tell them: greater than the world's chaos are its miracles."

Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

#katherine rundell #impossible creatures #quote #i am obsessed with this #greater than the world's chaos are its miracles

[goldencrownofsorro]

#katherine rundell #children's poetry #children's literature #children's book #bookseller #bookshop #bbc culture

[quietflorilegium]

"She had never felt less afraid. Perhaps, she thought, that’s what love does. It’s not there to make you feel special. It’s to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood. Love and courage, thought Sophie — two words for the same thing. You didn’t need the person to be there with you, even, perhaps. Just alive, somewhere."

Katherine Rundell, "Rooftoppers"

#katherine rundell #rooftoppers #sophie maxim #fear #courage #bravery #love

[loneberry]

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” --K Chesterton * “It’s something that [John] Donne is quite clear on. Wonder, astonishment and life-long awe take the kind of iron will and ferocious discipline that most of us have neither the time nor the capacity for."

“Failure to pay attention has been at the root of many of our failures. I mean attention as a bodily and political act, not just an intellectual discipline.

...The John Donnian wonder that encompasses death, plague, chaos, betrayal and still says, ‘You are such a marvel that to do anything other than to live focused and alert is a denigration of that which we should be.’” --Katherine Rundell

#Katherine rundell #john donne #wonder #awe #literature #poetry

[violet-yimlat]

Behold! The glorious mess which is my reading pile. Happy to discuss any book from any series that you see here, unless this is going to be my first time reading the book in question. I’ll note it beside the titles. From top to bottom, we have;

Dante’s Divine Comedy

The Cay

Blood brothers

Stone cold

Shade’s children

Paradise lost + paradise regained

A ballad of songbirds and snakes

The rangers apprentice

the extremely inconvenient adventures of Bronte Mettlestone

How to cheat a dragon’s curse

Giant

The Shepard’s crown

Zo and the forest of secrets

Midnighters

Making Money

Grim tales

Neverwhere

The northern lights

The subtle knife

The amber spyglass

Chime seekers

Nura and the immortal palace

Life of Pi

Frostheart 2 (can’t remember name )

Terciel & Elenor

The hobbit

Face like glass

The light fantastic

How to twist a dragon’s tail

Kay’s anatomy

Happy here

Gullstruck island

The graveyard book

Charmed life

The hunger games

The borrowers

A hero’s guide to deadly dragons

The ragwitch

The unraveller

Sabriel

Truckers

Diggers

Wings

Surface detail

The left hand of darkness

Which way to anywhere

Carter beats the devil

Mortal engines

Violet Veil and a case of grave danger

Catching fire

Kat Wolfe investigates

The wolf wilder

Liriel

#neil gaiman #garth nix #his dark materials #terry pratchett #phillip pullman #the hunger games #Francis hardinge #cressida cowell #katherine rundell #books #bookworm #bibliophile #if I die in the next week #the pile probably fell #on top of me #📕

[diaryoftruequotes]

I think, actually, everyone starts out with some strange in them. It's just whether or not you decide to keep it.

Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers

#Katherine Rundell #Rooftoppers #quotes #book quotes

[beguines]

There is the meat and madness of sex in his work – but, more: Donne's poetry believed in finding eternity through the human body of one other person. It is for him akin to sacrament. Sacramentum is the translation in the Latin Bible for the Greek word for mystery: and Donne knew it when he wrote, 'We die and rise the same, and prove/Mysterious by this love.' He knew awe: 'All measure, and all language, I should pass/Should I tell what a miracle she was.' And in 'The Ecstasy', love is both a mystery and its solution. He needed to invent a word, 'unperplex', to explain:

'This ecstasy doth unperplex,' / We said, 'and tell us what we love…' / But as all several souls contain / Mixture of things, they know not what, / Love these mixed souls doth mix again, / And makes both one, each this and that.

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

#katherine rundell #super-infinite #john donne

[sheepisreading]

Books I finished in May 2023

Again, not a lot here but y’know.

Edit: forgot a book!

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, Katherine Rundell, 2022

A book I just randomly picked up at the bookstore. I don’t know, I loved the Bill Bryson Shakespeare biography, and this seemed to be in a similar vein but more genuine than funny, which I appreciate. I was also attracted to the book because the idea of the renaissance man, concerned by all subjects of study, is always of interest to me. I’d never actually heard of John Donne, but after rading the book, I definitely understad why people write books about him. Katherine Rundell writes with such distinction and beauty about Donne, using excerpts of his writing and of other scholars’ writing, the whole book is a delight to read. You don’t even have to care one bit about John Donne to read it, I know I didn’t at the start, but I grew to thanks to the exquisite way Rundell tells us about his life. I recommend it ! 

A Certain Hunger, Chelsea G. Summers, 2020

This book I first heard from last year, bought it, and then proceded not to read it for a year. I just didn’t feel like it I guess. I finally picked it up because I had nothing else left to read at my student accomodation. It’s a book about a food writer who kills her lovers. She writes from prison (not a spoiler) and recounts how it all went down. I didn’t vibe with the overly serious food descriptions at first, but I got used to it as I read. It was kinda cool, it’s a contemporary setting too, and I don’t usually read murdery books, so it was a nice change of pace for me. I grew more attached to the narrator towards the end. She really grew on me, I found her a bit pretentious at first but she does show another more introspective and self aware view which warmed me up to her a lot. Basically, a good crime book!

Radical Intimacy, Sophie K. Rosa, 2023

This book was probably handed to me by the gods above. I say that because I read an old fanfic (here, it’s amazing (it’s also fall out boy fanfic be warned)) in like April in which radical intimacy as a concept is mentioned as basically relationship anarchy mixed with non monogamy and like sex and romantic gestures between friends. All of which I subscribe very very much to. I googled radical intimacy after reading it and immediately this book (which JUST came out) popped up! It’s amazing and basically full of everything I’ve always wanted to read on the topics of relationships (or all kinds)! It’s separated in chapters dealing with romance, sex, family, death, friendship under capitalism, and how relationships between people are the thing. As in the thing ever. And I could not agree more! Nonconformative relationships are precious to me and seeing them being spoken about so openly and true-ly was wonderful, especially put into perspective with politics! It’s like Rosa wrote my thoughts out (after doing some research and applying theory to them). I can not recommend this book enough!

#bookblr #books #bookish #book community #book review #chelsea g summers #sophie k rosa #a certain hunger #radical intimacy #katherine rundell #john donne #i guess

[west-o-the-moon]

John Donne was, according to Katherine Rundell, "a neologismist. He accounts for the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary of around 340 words in the English language. Apprehensible, beauteousness, bystander, criminalist, emancipation, enripen, fecundate, horridness, imbrothelled, jig." — Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber, 2022)

#john donne #katherine rundell #neologisms #words #Oxford English Dictionary #etymology #super-infinite #literature #poetry #poets #seventeenth century #metaphysical poetry #Renaissance

[dk-thrive]

Tap humans, he believed, and they’d ring with the sound of infinity.

Awake is his call. And Donne’s work laid out how: He insisted on the vivid, the alert, the original. His poetry is famously difficult, and the images can sometimes take all your sustained focus to untangle. That is deliberate. In repayment for your effort, you will look at the world with both more awe and more skepticism...If the human soul was visible, he believed, it would be larger than the world itself. “It is too little to call Man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world doth, nay, than the world is,” he wrote in “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.” Tap humans, he believed, and they’d ring with the sound of infinity.

— Katherine Rundell, What John Donne Knew About Death Can Teach Us a Lot About Life (The New York Times, Sept. 10, 2022)

#John Donne #Katherine Rundell #alive #live #life #death #gratitude #potential #possibility

[airlealilac]

A recent book recommendation, I am waiting for my copy to arrive!

#bookblr #book recommendations #books #books and coffee #studyblr #golden mole #katherine rundell