A fan website for Dostoevsky! No need to give up on humanity just yet! There’s even a forum to discuss him and other Russian authors you love.

And if you haven’t gone yet, here’s something to make you curious. At the site you can see a bigger version of this:

No, I’m not going to tell you what it is. Off you go! And post on their forum — the world needs more people talking about books!

“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.”
Crime and Punishment

Okay, it’s not true — but it feels that way sometimes.

I love Paris and can’t imagine living anywhere else, but I crave English-language bookshops. I dream about them: stuffed to the rafters, esoteric, carefully chosen, Daniel Steele/John Grisham forbidden on pain of death…they’ll even have that biography of Keats (the corrected edition) and oh, where’s my list?!?

I’m salivating. Sorry.

So, to ease the pain, I’ve been trawling the web in search of well-written, well-thought-out blogs by people who read. My blog is a scattered mess, added to only when I have a spare second. These people’s blogs are what mine aspires to.

So Many Books (I’ve been reading this one for ages. Magnificent!)

Chekhov’s Mistress

NovelWorld

***Find of the month (thank you Chekhov’s Mistress!): Zbigniew Herbert

Another irreplaceable, old-school travel writer gone.

Here’s a bit of audio with couple of short snippets of interviews with Eric Newby and his wife Wanda short article with a great photo and the official Guardian obit.

If you’ve read Flaubert in Egypt or Geoffrey Wall’s magnificent biography Flaubert, you’ll remember Gustave’s travel companion, Maxime Du Camp.

Before they headed to Egypt, Du Camp studied for six months with a professional photographer. No disposable or point-and-shoot digital in those days! You practically had to be a chemist. And the amount of luggage it generated was incredible: bottles and bottles of delicate chemicals, crates of glass plates plus all the peripheral equipment and finally, the camera itself. It was a major undertaking.

And Du Camp, if memory serves, was the first to take photos in Egypt. The first to capture the pyramids, the desert, the ancient monuments. I remember reading somewhere (where?) that Flaubert was horrified — no one would ever see these things for themselves first, through their own eyes. From then on, everyone would see these wonders through layers of previously seen photographs.

Well, it’s far too late to us, drenched as we are in images. So enjoy flipping through some lovely early photos of Egypt and North Africa and here’s a complete NYPL scan of the book of photos that Du Camp published when he returned.

And just for fun, here’s an excerpt from Wall’s bio.

Flaubert made conscientious efforts to imitate the bizarre cry of the camel. “I hope to perfect it before we leave, but it is quite difficult because of the particular gurgling sound that quivers somewhere beneath the screech…” […and a little later…] Suppressing the urge to put a bullet through his friend’s head, Du camp sent Flaubert away to ride ahead at a safe distance.