I love the unz website; it's addictive because there are so many old magazines from the early 20th century with charming romantic short stories and sweet covers. 

There's also mystery and fashion and occasional "tawdriness" to combat the overall quaint sense of a completely different time, even if it was mostly illusion.

http://www.unz.org/Pub/AllPeriodicals

I'm in awe of The Beginning Of Us, which I just finished and was immensely relieved (though surprised) had a happy, realistic ending, true to the spirit of the book.

There are so many beautiful things about the novella, especially the writing and mood.

But something else that I loved about it is how Tara and Eliza slowly (very slowly) fall in love and how it's all about the day trips they share and their common interests in nature and literature. When they stay overnight during one of their first weekend trips, they sleep in separate beds. There is not one sex scene anywhere in the story and I find that so incredibly refreshing and sweet, only lovely passages, like this one, that make my heart skip a few beats:

One evening on a walk in the snow, I broke a stick off a bush and wrote I LOVE YOU, ELIZA in the snow, and instead of telling me I had crossed some boundary, you laughed and told me one of the reasons you loved me so much was that I knew how to use commas properly.

In the author information following the end of The Beginning, Sarah Brooks says she writes the lesbian fiction she wishes she could read. I totally get that and sincerely hope she writes lots more in the future.

I am so excited to be excited about things again...trying personal experiences can suck the life right out of your enthusiasm. My newest thing to be grateful for is this...

The Novel: A Biography is so heavy (well over 1000 pages) that it actually sank my bed down a tad. I saw it on the shelf at the library and "700 years" and "history of the novel" just jumped out at me when I looked at the flyleaf.

I am way more giddy than I should be about it, but I love stuff like this and so many of the titles referred can be found on Google books and downloaded for free through Kindle and Google Play...as if there aren't already enough books to read!!

There aren't any reviews for it on Amazon, but the Goodreads crowd really seems to like it. I agree with some reviewers who say it's the kind of book you have to buy and have nearby all the time.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770233-the-novel?from_search=true

as seen on Random House's Facebook page

 

 



The other day I mentioned a book called The Beginning Of Us by Sarah Brooks:

Even though it's only 93 pages, I'm still reading it. Last night I found myself actually crying over the story, though I still have no clue how it's going to end or why I care so much about the characters.

I think, perhaps, it's hit a personal nerve that I've never experienced something so mutually reciprocated and tender, with both people clearly adoring and caring about each other, yet both women seriously denying what they are emotionally and romantically experiencing.

The other thing is this is the kind of title I'd give anyone who says two people of the same gender can't possibly fall in love. Ironically, the people I'd want to give it to would probably never read it...but it shows, rather than tells, exactly how beautiful feelings can be. It's so good it makes 90% of the other lesfic I've read (even some of the better stuff) seem like absolute trash.

There are so many wonderful passages, such as this one:

I think you playfully hit my backpack then, and when I turned around to grin at you, I caught something in your gaze that I didn’t understand—and know now you didn’t either. That early, I saw love in your eyes.

The Iowa woods are enchanting. My grandmother, a lover of nature and especially of the woods, had taught me to love the names of the oaks—bur, red, northern pin. I love their thick grooved trunks and their broad prayers of branches. I recognized lindens and hawthorn, buckeye and hickory. Near the ground, witch hazel. The path, dirt now, wove gently beneath the green, arched cathedral ceiling of those great trees, and somewhere nearby a house wren sang.

“What do you see?” you asked. I wanted to be poetic. In class, you read poetry like others read aloud religious texts, and I wanted you to understand how beautiful I found those woods, how connected and grounded they made me feel.

“Tara?”

Why did it surprise me to hear you use my name? It was as if I thought you didn’t know it...some quality to your voice just then, some softness, some tenderness, startled me into silence. The house wren, too.

There's a purity to The Beginning Of Us that you don't see in too many love stories these days (gay or straight) and I think that's what resonates with me the most...

Learning about things new to me often gets me out of a funk.  There are so many great things undiscovered out there and so little time to find them. I am so glad I've started reading The Sunday Times or I might not have discovered Pergolesi-Stabat Mater and its awesome, calming yet overwhelming beauty.

I did not know a thing about  this recording (or any performance of it), but am  so enthralled I cannot stop listening...soprano Margaret Marshall performs on this particular release.

Wikipedia explains more about the original music:

Stabat Mater Dolorosa, often referred to as Stabat Mater, is a 13th-century Catholic hymn to Mary, variously attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi and to Innocent III. It is about the Sorrows of Mary.^[1][2][3]
The title of the sorrowful hymn is an incipit of the first line, Stabat mater dolorosa ("The sorrowful mother stood").^[4] The Stabat Mater hymn, one of the most powerful and immediate of extant medieval poems, meditates on the suffering of Mary, Jesus Christ's mother, during his crucifixion. It is sung at the liturgy on the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. The Stabat Mater has been set to music by many composers, with the most famous settings being those by Palestrina, Pergolesi, Alessandro Scarlatti and Domenico Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Haydn, Rossini, Poulenc, and Dvořák.
The Stabat Mater was well known by the end of the 14th century and Georgius Stella wrote of its use in 1388, while other historians note its use later in the same century. In Provence, about 1399, it was used during the nine days processions.^[5]
As a liturgical sequence, the Stabat Mater was suppressed, along with hundreds of other sequences, by the Council of Trent, but restored to the missal by Pope Benedict XIII in 1727 for the Feast of the Seven Dolours of the Blessed Virgin Mary.^[6]
 

It appeared on a playlist of  actress Janet McTeer's favorite songs , one of which is "Nothing Compares 2 U," something I usually avoid at all costs since it has to be one of the most emotionally draining listening experiences ever. She also cites "Hallelujah" (particularly Jeff Buckley's cover) as another strong favorite.