beguile_thy_sorrow

I'm just your average bookish girl that decided, on a whim, to try something new. I'm a common reader really, as Virginia Woolf might say; I spend my free time reading... more

I'm just your average bookish girl that decided, on a whim, to try something new. I'm a common reader really, as Virginia Woolf might say; I spend my free time reading, in my "rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on". I mention Virginia, but don't get me wrong. I read mostly popular fiction these days. While many of the "classics" and distinguished literature have burned themselves into my soul, I'm a regular gal that reads Sookie Stackhouse novels, and then watches True Blood. Some of my favorite books have been books that critics deem crap, and some have been Pulitzer prize winners. All I know is that I liked 'em. And you might too. You may be wonderin' why I titled my blog "Beguile Thy Sorrow." Well, there's a part in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus where Lavinia, Titus' daughter, is raped and assaulted so brutally that her injuries prevented her from reading. Tamora's sons not only defiled her, but also cut off her hands and cut out her tongue, stealing her senses of touch and taste. Lavinia's sorrow is compounded in its presentation of her forced silence. She can not tell her story, and she can not even pick up a book from the library shelf; instead she "turns over with her stumps the books which LUCIUS has let fall," Act 4, Scene 1. When Titus sees her grief, he bids the boy to turn the pages of whatever books she so chooses. He tells her, "Come, and take choice of all my library, And so beguile thy sorrow." I too share the conviction that there is indeed solace in books, and so my blog was born.