She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for January, 2008
February Eve~ Imbolc
Today (in this hemisphere and Time Zone!) is February Eve, also known as Imbolc. From Chalice Center:
“The First of February belongs to Brigid, (Brighid, Brigit, Bride,) the Celtic goddess who in later times became revered as a Christian saint. Originally, her festival on February 1 was known as Imbolc or Oimelc, two names which refer to the lactation of the ewes, the flow of milk that heralds the return of the life-giving forces of spring. Later, the Catholic Church replaced this festival with Candlemas Day on February 2, which is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and features candlelight processions. The powerful figure of Brigid the Light-Bringer overlights both pagan and Christian celebrations.”
I encourage you to go to this article at Chalice Center to learn more about Imbolc; it’s beautifully written and detailed. Anything that heralds the return of light and spring and warmth is welcome! As for us, we’ll be lighting white candles and browsing heirloom seed catalogues in preparation for this year’s garden. And trying to keep warm while awaiting spring.
Next: A Challenge
The first- line contest has ended and I hope everyone who visited during these past few days, and those who entered, had as much fun giving their brain a work-out as I did coming up with this. Our winner, Surrealist Gesture (read his blog here), was first with all the correct titles and authors. The second entry, from Steve Posin (his entry is in the comments section of this post), also had all of the answers correct. (I would have accepted either A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Remembrance of Things Past, In Search of Lost Time or Swann’s Way for the Proust quote. Trust Marcel to make things complicated.) The third entry, from Quinn McDonald, had a couple of answers wrong but she made her entry interesting to read with her remembrances and remarks on the books.
And now, on to the challenge. No, this challenge doesn’t have a goofy acronym like NaNoWriMo (if you are thinking “whut?” like I did the first time I saw this, google it). I’ve seen these GoAcs (goofy acronyms) for everything from comitting to writing every day for a month to doing yoga every day to committing to thinking every day (just kidding on that last one). On second thought, why buck a trend? Let’s have a GoAc for this challenge:
REvBoITConCha!
It’s the Read Every Book in This Contest Challenge! I give you one year. The Prize? There isn’t anything I could give you that would be of greater worth than what reading these authors will give you.
First-line Contest with a Prize
If you know anything about me, you know that I love to read books. I Read. A Lot. Of Books. I was, in honor of the end of the Old Year and the beginning of 2008, going to give you a list of the books I’ve read over the past year, the ones I’m reading now, and the ones lined up waiting to be read. Then I thought: boring. For anybody except me.
So then I thought: Contest! Prize! Everyone loves a contest, right? You love a prize, don’tcha? Well, here’s your chance to show off your literary chops and add to your Christmas booty as well. If you win, that is.
So, here’s the contest: I’m going to list the first line of some of the books I’ve read this year and you get to answer with the author and the book in which the line appears. Put your answers in the comment box below. At the end of the contest time, the person with the most correct answers wins! Simple, no? Oh, and no fair googling (or any other kind of searching) for answers; if you don’t know an answer, say so.
Here are the first lines (or snippets of them):
1. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
2. “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family…”
3. “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”
4. “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the particulars about…”
5. “Marley was dead, to begin with.”
6. “On the 24th of February, 1815, the watch-tower of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.”
7. ”Call me Ishmael.”
8. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by any body else, these pages must be show.”
Hint: All of the books are considered “classics”. And the prize? (Wait for it.) A $25 gift certificate at Amazon, which I’m sure you will use to buy a book. I would. Oh, and the contest ends January 4th, 2008 at midnite, EST in the US.
Bonne Chance!
(The picture at the top of this post is our latest acquisition of books, the Harper & Brothers Household Edition of Charles Dickens’ works (16 in the edition, we got 14), published in the decade after Dickens’ death in 1870.)
