Every tour has to start somewhere, and preferably at a place where there’s books. And what better way to begin an intense day of sightseeing than with Library of Congress?
I have to be honest with you: in general I find grand and magnificent libraries a little … intimidating. I prefer cheap paperbacks to Gutenberg bibles, chaotic second hand bookshops to grand rooms with pillars and painted ceilings, and if a book has to be kept behind glass it ceases to be a book to me and becomes a historical artifact instead, which is interesting but not inspiring. So I came to Library of Congress prepared to pretend to admire it and feel guilty about not really feeling it.
And yet… it was amazing. There were inspiring quotes near the ceiling (“Too low they build who build beneath the stars”, “Words are also actions and actions are a kind of words”), The Main Reading Room was like a renaissance square with what looked like separate buildings that all contained books. The entire building was just an celebration of enlightment, the evolution of civilisation, the good old greeks and the best in mankind. And in these times we live in I found it impossible to resist the beauty of believing in the best in people.
Let me end this blog post by quoting their ceiling again: The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.
I am back in the US! How I love this crazy country. Our trip began, as it often does in the US, with a lovely talkative cab driver who gave us an improvized guided tour: he pointed out the national mall, several “federal buildings”, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Capitol Hill, the little house where a nine children-family once lived and where the father was responsible for watching the river. Nowadays it was by a road.
Interestingly enough, I have very few literary association of Washington DC. It doesn’t feel like a literary city. More movies and television series and non-fiction books about Trump. That being said, there are of course still several amazing bookshops. I’m here to visit the friend who first took me to the US and my Iowa. When she moved here for work she gave me a book that listed all the bookshops in the area, secure in the knowledge that nothing more was needed to make me visit. And here I am. She has selected the two best ones for us to visit.
She has also given me my very own coffee cup. With a cat, of course. Those of you who follows this blog knows our long history with cats (where it all began: http://katarinabivald.se/en/blog/dewey-readmore-books-2/)
My next book, Pine Away Motel and Cabins, is being translated into French as we speak (my American publisher is also hard at work with the English translation), and my French publisher just sent me this amazing new cover for it. Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?
I love how passionate we are about topics that the rest of the world might not neccessarily realize they need to know more about. I love how generous we are with our knowledge, gladly imparting it on the people that’s near and dear to us. I love how no topic is too big or too small to devote our time to. I love how much time we devote to it. I, for example, have a soft spot for the black plague, but I can get nerdy about almost everything.
And my latest nerdy interest is geology in general, and Oregon geology in specific. I love the time perspective it offers us; how anything that happened in, say, the last hundred million years is just a short time away, how the entire human history is just a blink of an eye in the perspective of rocks, how everyting changes, just very, very slowly (did you know that mountains grow? Right this minute. Getting bigger as we speak. Or smaller, of course. Apparently it differs).
Oregon geology also plays an important role in my next novel (to be published in English sometime during 2019). Which brings us to one of my favourite things about being a writer: how you can just contact nerds all over the world and ask them to talk to you about their favourite topics. And they do! So two geologists in Oregon spent hours over Skype trying to teach me everything I needed to know about the fascinating rocks of Oregon and everyday life as a geologist. It was glorious! I’m sure there are still plenty of mistakes in my book, but no shadow falls over them. They did they best. They tried.
And not only that. This week they sent me a beatiful collection of rocks in Oregon. How lovely is that? Together with a long list describing the different rock samples, of course. Bluechist, serpentine, basalt, thundereggs – rock samples of all different shapes and weight and feel and texture.
In my book you will of course learn more than you ever knew you needed about Oregon geology, but you can already view the rock samples on my Instagram. My name there is katarinabivald, so I’m sure you’ll find me.
My next novel is going to be published in Sweden in late August (the preliminary English title is Pine Away Motel and Cabins, publication date so far unknown), so right now I’m in the final stages of editing. I love this part of being a writer, when you get to work on a story that already has a beginning, middle and end and when even small changes has big effects.
That being said, it is even better to send in your manuscript and just kick back, knowing that the editor is the one that has to do all the work for a while. And no one can say I didn’t plan it well: an unprecedented summer heat wave arrived just as I had sent in my manuscript. So while my poor editor sweats away, I get to go swimming and read in the grass (so called “research”).
No one said this life was fair.
PS. I had ice cream as well, but I ate it before I had time to photograph it.
