Jay will be visiting Valparaiso, Chile soon and I have been doing some research. (Hi, Jay!) It is winter there, though it’s hard not to think of Chile as lush, green and humid.  Chile… the homeland of one of my favorite poets, Pablo Neruda.  Chile… home to Chilean wine!

Oh, how I wish I could go to Chile!  Maybe next year…

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

~Pablo Neruda

I think tonight I will curl up with Pablo Neruda’s poetry (and a glass of Chilean wine?) and dream of Chile…

Posted by Kristina in Books and Reading at 06:34 PM Permalink 1 comment

I’m anxiously waiting my contributor copy of Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women to arrive.  I hear it’s hot-- and with the lineup Rachel Kramer Bussel has put together, I don’t doubt it.  Some of my favorite dirty girls are represented-- Shanna Germain, Alison Tyler, Gwen Masters, Teresa Noelle Roberts… just to name a few!

I accidentally came across this Twitter comment by Viviane to my editor mentioning my story, “Beautiful Creature.” That made me smile-- and immediately start following Viviane!  I love Twitter. 

Viviane is kicking off a “virtual book tour” for Dirty Girls at her blog Sex Carnival, so drop by and read an excerpt of Rachel’s story ”Icy Hot.”

Rachel has also set up a Dirty Girls blog, featuring interviews, upcoming readings and other fun stuff!  I only wish I could go to one of the readings in New York or San Francisco.

It’s going to get dirty around here this spring-- bring on the April showers!

Posted by Kristina in Books and Reading in Writing at 03:12 PM Permalink 1 comment

Found this little book meme over at Jennifer’s blog:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your TBR list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway*
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales*
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels*
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury*
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

(I’d add the rest of the books on my to-be-read list, but I would be here all night.)

Posted by Kristina in Books and Reading at 09:59 PM Permalink Leave a comment