Haweswater by Sarah Hall

During the time between the two world wars, a small village in the English Lake District is threatened with destruction to make way for a dam to provide water for the industrial city of Manchester. This novel explores how this threat affects the individuals and community of the village, focussing specifically on the Lightburn family. Janet Lightburn is a young woman with a determined mind and passionate nature, who is fiercely committed to securing a future for the village. She negotiates a longer time period for the villagers to evacuate, enabling them greater opportunity to find alternative jobs and housing, she also secures funding to rebuild the village school. She has reckoned without falling in love with Jack Liggett, who has been sent from manchester to oversee the building of the dam. Their fiery love story is at the centre of this novel, which is written with a wonderful eye for detail, characters and the landscape are all described beautifully. The central story around how the village copes with the dam has a lot of resonances for communities across the world today who are threatened with inappropriate developments that potentially damage the environment and people who depend on it.

Haweswater by Sarah Hall, published by Faber

The Green Books Campaign

On 10 November, 200 bloggers will simultaneously post reviews of 200 books printed on environmentally-friendly paper. By focussing on books printed using greener methods, Eco-Libris aims to raise awareness of the environmental aspects of buying books. This year’s participation of both bloggers and books has doubled from the event’s inception last year. I'll be writing a review of part of this campaign, which you will be able to read here and on my Goodreads page.

"Although there’s so much hype around e-books, books printed on paper still dominate the book market, and we want them to be as environmentally sound as possible,” explains Raz Godelnik, co-founder and CEO of Eco-Libris. “Their share is still relatively small, but you can find a growing number of books printed responsibly and we hope this initiative will bring more exposure to such books. Through this campaign we want to encourage publishers to increase their green printing options and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books.”

Learn more about the Green Books Campaign and find a list of all participants here.

Eco-Libris works to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices in the industry, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. To achieve these goals Eco-Libris works with book readers, publishers, authors, bookstores and others in the book industry worldwide. So far Eco-Libris has balanced out more than 150,000 books, resulting in more than 165,000 new trees planted with its planting partners in developing countries.

Altered Book - Autumn

I thought it might be nice to revisit the altered book I made after I'd visited Italy a few years ago now.

I made the book from an old anthology of articles from the Italian press. You can see the original book in this post.

This is the autumn colour page of the book. The background is an article about Italia Nostra, which is an Italian conservation group. The leaves we found on a walk in the woods near the River Po in Torino. I coloured the background in pencil crayon.

You can see other pages of the book here, here and here.

I've started collecting autumn leaves again this year and hope to make some collages with them!

Concentric Circles by Yang Lian

Yang Lian has been hailed as one of the most innovative and influential of Chinese poets. This collection certainly supports that view. The poems are mostly collages in form, with images and phrases playing against each other, sometimes with no instantly obvious connection. Careful reading though means that the images together have a very powerful cumulative effect. Many of the images and phrases come from the natural world, including: 'autumn vibrates between nows like a crazy musical instrument' which I used as the inspiration for this poem.

There is a haunting sense of mystery in a lot of the poems, which often seem fairly surreal and sometimes sinister:

twelve kinds of self reaping harvests move into refrigerated sky (from Schloss Solitude)

on ocean's map......marbles secretly constructed like revenge (from The Transmigration of Gardens)

flocks of concrete birds......cover your timeless window (from Constructed Ground)

This isn't easy poetry, but nor is it wilfully obscure. It deserves patient reading and re-reading, which will reveal it to be inspiring and meditative.

It feels perhaps a bit like a Chinese Puzzle Box, talking of which, many thanks to Paul over at Gingatao for sending me a copy of 'The Puzzle Box' his collection of poetry and prose, which I will say more about once I've read it, probably over at Over Forty Shades.

Altered Book

I mentioned a while ago that I had found the perfect book to alter (because there are missing pages and pages repeated) and I've now at last started working on it. This is the first page I've altered. The text is about monitoring moths at sand dunes, so I illustrated it appropriately using a magazine photo of sand dunes and drawing a moth, randomly chosen from my book of moths and butterflies. I've not decided yet what to do with the facing page, though I'll probably add more moths!

A Future Altered Book

I had picked up a copy of Fly: An Experimental Life by Martin Brooks from a second hand shop. I noticed it had been withdrawn from a library very soon after publication, which I thought was a shame until I opened it up and realised that any self respecting librarian would take it off the shelves. The second half of chapter 2 and the first half of chapter 3 are missing, then there are two copies of the second half of chapter 3, a bit like a mutant fly. So, once I've read the bits of the book that are there (fascinating chapters on what experiments with fruit flies can tell us about ageing, reproduction and evolution) then I'll be making it into an altered book! I'll post the best pages here.

Favourite Souvenir

Inspire Me Thursday's art journal challenge this week is to journal our favourite holiday souvenir. This gave me an ideal opportunity to add this page to my still incomplete altered book holiday journal of our trip to Italy in November 2005. We bought the bottle in Ventimiglia, a lovely Italian town on the coast near the French border. It's a very beautiful bottle, but we were very disappointed by the quality of the amaretto that was in it! Never mind, it's still a lovely ornament!

Book Inspired Art

Inspire Me Thursday recently had a makeover and is a now a wonderful resource for inspiration for crafting bloggers. This week's prompt is to be inspired by books. I love books! For my direct response to the prompt I started a new altered book. I have a copy of In Other Words (The Journal for Literary Translators) which struck me as ideal material for an altered book. I will work on this slowly and will occasionally post pages. This is the first page. I selected words from the text and then built up a picture around these words. I deliberately kept this simple, largely due to not having time to do anything complicated! It all looks a bit pale in the photo, but i hope you get the idea! The silver circle represents both the moon and the mirror in the selected text. The selected words almost form a poem:

Alone for years
translator holds up a mirror
many moons ago
impenetrable prose
light shone into dark
meaning opening up.
Translator -
watcher of the shadow and what it suggests.
Meanings hover between words
poetry
dazzling.


For other examples of my book related crafts, please see:

Notebooks made from recycled materials
A page from my first altered book.
Another page from my first altered book

Altered Book 5

The background to this page is an article about holidays in the city, so it seemed an appropriate background to a photo of Turin and some tickets etc from our time there!

Altered Book 4

This page of the book features the Hanbury Botanical Gardens, on the coast between Ventimiglia and the French border. The background is a pencil crayoned sketch from a photo and I stuck in two tickets for the gardens. In this case, the text has nothing to do with the pictures, I'm running out of appropriate text!

Altered Book 2

I'm much happier with this page than with the earlier page in the book! We visited the Museo di Antichita in Torino so I've pasted a ticket from the museum plus a separate copy of the photo onto an article about archeological discoveries with the photo echoed in a pencil crayon design across the page.

Altered Book 1

Now that I'm back from Italy, I'm starting to put together my first altered book. The book itself is mostly in Italian, which makes an ideal background for this scrapbook. I'm trying to keep as much as possible to the principles of recycling for this altered book, eg I'm not intending to print out digital photos to include. I'll customise our Plane Tickets Travel Wallet to hold my non-digital photos to complement the book. I've started the book with a double page spread on the Museum of Cinema in Turin, which is housed in the tallest building in Turin, the Mole Antonelliana. I cut out a drawing of the building from a publicity leaflet and pasted it onto a background that I had coloured to vaguely illustrate the hills around Turin. I've used pencil crayons as they seemed the best option for the glossy paper in this book. The first article on the page is about theatre and is followed by an article on Turin's football team, which offered some approriate words that I highlighted in the second part of this double spread, where I have pasted our tickets to the exhibition of science fiction films that was showing when we visited the museum. It's an excellent museum too...

My First Altered Book!

I've become fascinated with altered books - old books used as a base for making art journals or other pieces of art. This book is a 1970s collection of articles from Italian newspapers and magazines, with notes in English. It is probably too out of date to be much use to anyone (I certainly prefer reading the current issue of Oggi!). So this will be my first altered book - a journal of my three weeks in Italy. I'll draw on the blank pages, paste in momentoes and photos and pick out found poetry from the text. Plus I'll leave in some of the cartoons, which are the best thing in here!

It may not work, but I'm sure it will be fun trying! I'll post my progress here!