Vivian Swift: Author, Blogger and All Around Cool Person

Books, gardens, art, blogs, London, Morocco, witty people, friends...

How everything is wonderfully combined inVivian Swift's new book coming out on March 1st. 

Mine arrived in the mail last week because I'm mentioned in the acknowledgements (so is Buster!).

Lucky me! 

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/vivian-swift/gardens-of-awe-and-folly/

Kirkus review thinks the book is wonderful - as I do. I've known about the book for a while as Vivian has been working on it for ages. She is so very funny - and so very knowledgeable. So the book is a compendium of delights.

The two gardens mentioned in the book that I know very well and have blogged about are The Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh with its splendid blue walls and the Chelsea Physic Garden in London.

How I miss living in Morocco.  That aside

Vivian is obsessed with the same door I was years ago

Look how they have tweaked the colors.

http://thehouseinmarrakesh.blogspot.com/2010/04/light-at-jardin-majorelle.html

Fish in the pond there.

Then the Chelsea Physic Garden in London.

How different the light is!

Vivian is very funny about the updated lunch room - and how it has changed. I exactly agree. It was wonderful years ago - but then so many things were. I'm getting ancient.

What an enviable gig - traveling and looking at gardens and writing about them too!  Not to mention the hard work of painting them then editing text and so forth.

I think this book would be a lovely present for anyone who likes any of the things mentioned in my first sentence.

Maybe spring will eventually get to New York - meanwhile I'm reading!

Beach/Reading

I rarely read anything at the beach,

but spend most of the time looking at the water.

Yesterday a lifeguard paddled his canoe.

However, some book suggestions:

Non fiction:

Virginia Nicholson's fascinating Singled Out --about the generation of   "surplus" women after the First World War. Splendidly informative and grippingly readable.

 Just Kids Patti Smith's memoir of Robert Mapplethorpe and the 1970's, brilliantly evocative of the era in both good and bad ways. Brings it all back.

Hints of mortality on the shoreline.

New Fiction:

The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco Richard Hamilton's elegant retelling of traditional tales told by the vanishing storytellers of Marrakesh. Not new stories exactly but recently published. Grimm's fairy tales meet A Thousand and One Nights!

A.M Homes: This Book will Save Your Life. Set in Los Angeles and addressing contemporary angst etc. Funny, sad, quirky and sharp.

Tried and True:

Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. I've only just read it for the first time.

Vanished England in a capsule. What weather! Such rustics.

Charles Dickens'A Christmas Carol. In view of current American politics, I rather like Scrooge saying, "Are there no workhouses?" and suggesting that the poor die and reduce the surplus population.......

After the beach, lunch at the Shipwreck Diner in Northport.

What a bizarre lunch....quiche, fruit, homefries, a pickle.

Oh well, now I needn't eat for a week.

I look forward to hearing what you're reading.

 Weaver of Grass has some super suggestions as do the people who

have commented on her post.

Moroccan SnapShots

Before we lived in New York, we lived in Marrakesh for two years.

See here

We are now back there for a short while...

enjoying mysterious doors....

... pastilla....which is flaky pastry with nuts and chicken and powdered sugar.......

 ...not to mention the fruit juice......

 ...the pot pourri

 and the lanterns.

last of all, a cat in the fruit market who is about to produce lots of little cats any minute...

this photo is for Joan Rundo who makes super cat calendars every year!