sweaty city/cold county

So every year at about this time (usually in May, June) I always feel a strong yearning for cold winter days: snow, wide-open spaces, gloves, vodka, solitude. I think it's my final clutching for calm when I'm already unable to sleep because the humidity is closing in and Barcelona is fast becoming a loud, sweaty, seething mass of bodies. So i'm just enjoying it for now......then when the heat becomes unbearable i'll spend most of the summer splishing about in the water with all the other sardines :D

I'm reading the most beautiful book about ordinary people in a stunningly beautiful, cold place. The language they use is just perfect.....it's the essence of everything I'm craving. I'm going to finish it tonight, so i wanted to write this now while there are still some words left for me to enjoy that I haven't read yet.

David Vann - Caribou Island (Penguin Books)

"Early winter, the temperature minus fifteen. The mountains would be white, the lake and glacier. Only the sky a new colour, rare winter sun, rare midwinter blue. The sun above the peaks moving sideways, unable to rise any higher."

"...She walked towards the glacier, towards the mountains, away from the island. Walked slowly. Then stopped and looked around. Without her footsteps, no sound. No wind, no moving water, no bird, no other human. This bright world. The sound of her heart, the sound of her own breath, the sound of her own blood in her temples, those were all she would hear. If she could make those stop, she could hear the world".

Penguin Great Ideas and bloody great covers

So recently I've been reading and writing alot more than i had been for a long time. it's been creative and inspiring.

There's an english bookshop on the corner near my work that i've been going into every few days for the last couple of weeks...but why? i discovered they stock the Penguin Great Ideas series of books - short works by different philosophers and writers from Ancient Greece and China to Victorian Britain and pre-war Germany. The authors range from Schopenhauer to Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Kant, Freud and beyond...

Of course they're mind-bendingly and head-scratchingly brilliant reads in themselves, but the cover art elevates them to a whole new level. i spent half an hour in there just fondling and staring at the covers today. I would have bought a few, but think a whole lot of other people must have the same idea - each one had been handled to death, and i like to get crisp pages for my money when i buy a new book. ok, i bought one.

the covers literally blow me away. it's such a perfect example of how good design and the right typography can make a good thing AMAZING.

here are a few of them. lush.