The Whole Book Experience

The Whole Book Experience is all about how a particular book might affect me as I read it. Of course the experience is literary. And with the fine and private press books I concentrate on for this blog, it is also sensory. But there are also intangibles like where the book came from, what the story is behind it, or a personal connection somewhere along my forty-five year reading life. These intangibles come to bear in the case of James Branch Cavell’s Jurgen. My mother’s mother, my nana, was kind enough to let her voracious reader and book-loving grandson pick her shelves clean. And on that shelf was 1921 The Bodley Head Limited edition of Jurgen. This is one of my family literary heirlooms. Continue reading →

How to start about a novel like Swann’s Way? How to articulate the feeling of reading Proust? That’s a touch challenge for me even on a second reading. It is definitely easier to dwell on the physical book itself, in this case the wonderful 1954 Limited Editions Club edition illustrated by Bernard Lamotte. And obtaining a copy of the LEC edition prompted me to jump into that second read much before the other two editions waiting on my shelf: the new Lydia Davis translation published in 2003 and the even more intimidating Pléiade edition en française. Eventually I’ll get to the Davis translation but I’m not sure my French will ever be up to the Pléiade. Continue reading →