Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Question of the Week


In Tulips For Augusta our heroine has some long nights at her great-aunt's bedside when the old lady suffers a spot of angina. Luckily, Tante Marijna has a night table stocked with books. And they are The Bible (the only time The Great Neels mentions such?) and the works of Jacob Cats, Pieter de Vries and Joost van den Vondel. I know, I know, you're rushing off to order them on Amazon too.

It's a lot of 17th Century Dutch poetry and Augusta deserves a medal for staying awake through the night with just those companions (which I am willing to admit might be delightful in your native tongue and during the daytime).

My question is: What's on your nightstand?

6 comments:

  1. My Nintendo DS. Nathan and I like to play some competitive Tetris before going to sleep.

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  2. I guess you newlyweds don't have enough to do...

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  3. I am embarassed to say that my nightstand reading presently overflow into 3 stacks onto the floor beside my bed (and it's a large nightstand): La Neels, of course!; Elizabeth George (mysteries); Alice Munro (I think she should win the Nobel Prize for Literature); Penelope Fitzgerald; Peter Matthiessen; Oxford Companion; Donna Leon (more mysteries!); John Updike; and a biography I'm really looking forward to getting to soon, Raymond Carver's.

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  4. Ah, thank goodness I triaged the bedside table recently or this would be a long, long comment.

    All I have on it now are three books I'm "technically" in the middle of reading. The Memory Garden by Rachel Hore (I started in years ago and got stalled, but it's set in Cornwall, so now I want to read it), Jess Michael's Taboo (a rather Brighton-based Regency romance), and The Desperate Duchess by Eloisa James.

    And some non-book clutter that I assume you don't want to know about, such as a plush turtle whose shell comes off.

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  5. Well, I have a stack of Georgette Heyer novels UNDER the table. On top of the table, we've just got my glasses, an alarm clock and sometimes a moderately pudgy calico cat.

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  6. Well mostly my cpap machine (sigh) is on my nightstand but I have a bajillion books on my kindle which is on the other pillow, so that counts right. And fun fact, I'm currently re-eading Tulips for Augusta right now!

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