10 Poetry Books to Celebrate the World Poetry Day

It's World Poetry Day today! That being a great opportunity to honour all those poets, who through their work taught us how to feel. A poem can be very powerful whether it's a few lines long, a haiku or pages long. Dreamlike or realistic, symbolic or satiric, a poem can take all these forms and even more. 

So, in this list you can find some amazing poetry to read today, in order to celebrate this genre.

Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Shakespeare

This is a collection of the 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare. They had a great influence to the future generations of poets all over the world and are considered as some of the finest examples of love poetry.

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Paradise Lost in an epic poem concerning the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. It was first published in 1667 and it's considered the greatest work of John Milton.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Ariel was published in 1965, just two years after the suicide of Sylvia Plath. The poems in Ariel are more personal to the poet and are considered as some of the best poems on the freedom of expression of the artist.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda

The second book by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was published in 1924. It is a collection of romantic poetry and the eroticism of the Twenty Love Poems caused controversy at the time.

Battered Guitars: Poems and Prose by Kostas Karyotakis

Kostas Karyotakis is a greek poet of the 1920s. His poems embrace expressionism and sometimes surrealism. 

100 Selected Poems by E. E. Cummings

Most of E. E. Cummings work is traditional, bringing modernity to the classic sonnet. They deal mostly with nature and love and are often satirical.

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie by Maya Angelou

This is the first collection of poems of Maya Angelou, it was published in 1971 and was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen

The Book of Longing was first published in 2006 and is a collection of poems and drawings of songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. It was mostly written at a Zen Monastery on Mount Baldy in California and many of the poems deal with love as a spiritual process.  

The Complete Poetry by Edgar Allan Poe

What can I say about Edgar Allan Poe that you don't already know? He is considered part of the American Romantic Movement and his works contain mystery and science fiction elements. The Raven is one of the most celebrated poems in history.

The Crescent Moon by Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1913. He is one of those that introduced the Indian culture to the west and his poetry is considered highly spiritual.

     

I Mustache You Some Questions Tag

Thanks to Killian @ Leaf On The Breeze for tagging me! Check out his blog, it's amazing.

Four Names People Call Me Other Than My Real Name

• Aeriko, this is actually a greek word and it means a fairy of the wind in greek folklore.
• Konna, my real name is Konstantina and this is a shorter version of it.
• Dina, this too is a shorter version of my name but I don't particularly like it. 
• It's actually these three :)

Four Jobs I've Had

• Secretary in an International Conference
• Assistant at a sports betting shop
• Lawyer Assistant
• Various voluntary works

Four Movies I've Watched More Than Once

• Before Sunset (actually the whole Before trilogy, but this one is my favourite)
• Bridget Jones' Diary (this is my bad mood movie) 
• In the Mood for Love
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy, because every now and then I just feel like it

Four Books I'd Recommend

• The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
• The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
• Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence 
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

All of those books have influenced me in a way. For individuals though my recommendations would be different.

Four Places I Have Lived

• A small town in the north of Greece
• Small periods of time in Athens
• Corfu, where I studied and I still spend almost all of my time there

Four Places I Have Been

• London, which I love and I always try to find an excuse to visit
• Paris
• Istanbul and other places in Turkey
• All over Greece 

Four Places I'd Rather Be Right Now

• Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. It's such an amazing bookshop!
• A certain coffee shop in Corfu
• In a park, a day much warmer than today
• Edinburgh

Four Things I Don't Eat

• Prosciutto
• Blood Sausages
• Oysters
• Jalapenos

Four of My Favourite Foods

• Pasta & Pizza. I have a thing for italian cuisine.
• Chicken Pie
• Scones
• Cheesecake

Four TV Shows That I Watch

• Sherlock
• Firefly
• Community
• The Office

It would actually be much easier if I could include anime in those four, but I can't really consider them as TV shows.

Four Things That I'm Looking Forward to This Year

• Star Wars, Episode VII
• The new Sufjan Stevens album (a few more days to wait actually)
• The new Muse album
• Comicdom Con in Athens

Four Things I'm Always Saying

• "I'm reading this..."
• Talk about the music and movies I like
• Gaming/Sci-fi/Fantasy/Anime references
• I need coffee

People I tag:

• Azee @ UnderCover Critique
• Nita @ Book Choose
• Carina @ My Addiction Books
• Anyone who would be intersted in doing so!

The Reading Book Post, March 16th

Another week has begun, but let's take a moment and see what happened in the literary world the previous days. 

• This is the time of the season when a lot of prizes annonce their longlists, and some even their shortlists. As we have seen, in the previous weeks the Romantic Novelist's Association announced the shortlists for the six categories and this week other organizations announced their lists. First, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction announced the longlist, consisting 20 novels. The judges will have to choose 6 of those and the final winner will be announced on 3rd June 2015. Moreover, the Wellcome Book Prize made this video announcement of the shortlist and the winner will be revealed on 29th April 2015. The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist was announced this week and the shortlist is due next month. Finally, George R. R. Martin nominated Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel for the Hugo Awards, a book well received by the science fiction community.

• Umberto Eco, the italian author of The Name of the Rose, will be releasing a new satirical novel on 3rd November 2015, named Numero Zero. The book is already published in Italy and is well-received, while its foreign rights are already sold to 34 countries.

• Are there any Mr. Darcy fans? I have some disturbing news for you (well, myself included). Author Joanna Trollope has argued that the much admired gentleman of the romantic literature has probably made his 10,000 pounds per year from exploitation, slavery included. Shocking right?

• The new Star Wars novel, Lords of the Sith, will include a lesbian character. The author of the novel Paul. S. Kemp has comfirmed that there will be indeed such a character. Lord of the Sith will be available on 28th April. Another book already added to my TBR list. 

• Kazuo Ishiguro has written lyrics for the jazz singer Stacey Kent. I wasn't aware of the fact and this interesting interview revealed other sides of the well known author, such as his experience as a lyricist and his family. 

• This week it was a really sad one. The much beloved author Sir Terry Pratchett died at the age of 66. The whole literary world is shaken by the news and a lot of novelists payed tribute to him sharing their memories and how his work affected theirs. Neil Gaiman, which was a friend of Terry Pratchett the last 30 years, talked about him and remembered him at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco Thursday night.

• To change the mood, I will end this post with this gallery of Premier League's footballers holding their favourite books. It's so interesting to see the different tastes of each one of them.    

Info on The Buried Giant

Title: The Buried Giant

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Publisher: Knopf

Date of Publication: March 3rd 2015

Number of Pages: 336

Summary:

The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruins. But at least, the wars the once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son the have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards - some strangw and otherwordly - but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they forsee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight - each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life's memories.

Listen to Kazuo Ishiguro discuss his new novel:

And hear an extract of The Buried Giant:

Review: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

Have you ever wondered what would be like to be immortal in a world, like ours, where mortals live? To be Atemporal in a world so temporal, to watch all those bone clocks age and die, while your body doesn't age and you see the centuries go by. But it's still not that simple. What if you were an atemporal that aged and died but your soul kept returning to other children bodies and you were caught up in a neverending life cycle? The Bone Clocks is a book about life and death, love, vanity and loneliness.

Holly Sykes is a teenage girl growing up in a small town in Britain. Since she was a little girl she heard voices, the Radio People as she calls them. When she runs away from home she meets a strange old lady that asks her for asylum. The circumstances come in a way that she has to accept. Years later and when she has almost forgot about it, this becomes the reason she gets involved in a war between natural atemporals and artificially made ones. This is also the point where she questions what is real and what is not, what does her psychic powers really mean and whether she can trust these people. Once she is convinced that the anchorites, the artificial atemporals, are the ones that kidnapped and killed her brother she is ready to take part and finally help the horologists.

But Holly doesn't have a metalife or any particular powers apart from getting glimpses of the very near future some periods of her life. As the years pass she grows old, she has a daughter and eventually becomes a grandmother. When life on earth becomes difficult again due to oil shortage she strives to make a comfortable enough life for her grandchild, although she is no longer young and suffers from several pains. In that stage of her life even her experiences with the horologists seem like a dream.

The Bone Clocks at first reminded me of Ghostwritten since each part is narrated by a different person and up to some point the parts are episodic. This at first made me worried especially when the first part ended and I didn't know what happened to Holly's brother and I really wanted to know more and all of a sudden we transfer to six years later, in a different place, through the eyes of a guy that didn't have anything to do with the story up to that point. But luckily all of the narrators meet and interact with Holly in some way or another so there are neither plot holes nor unaswered questions.

Not everyone in this book is a stranger to us though. To be precise, three chatacters from previous David Mitchell's novels appear in this one and two of them are quiet important for the story. First appears Hugo Lamb, the slightly older cousin of Jason's in Black Swan Green that was acting too cool. Well, his character hasn't changed at all and the role he has in The Bone Clocks suits him perfectly. From very early on the book we meet a certain Dr. Marinus, but only until he becomes the narrator we learn that he is Dr. Marinus from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved this character from the previous book and this didn't change for this one. He has grown to be one of my all time favourite characters. Lastly, scientist Mo Muntervary from Ghostwritten appears to be Holly's neighbour, both in advanced age trying to protect themselves from outlaws and other difficulties when the times get tough.

The Bone Clocks is a thrilling novel and at some points I just couldn't stop reading it because I was so worried about the characters. Holly is a lovable character and there are plenty of chances to grow strong bonds with her and being concerned about her well-being. As in real life unpleasant things happen to Holly and the people around her. These times the book gets heavy, but feels surprisingly real. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interesting in a realistic novel with strong fantasy elements. So, my advice is...

Get lost in this amazing story!