In the past few weeks, I’ve bought more books than I’ve probably purchased in the years since graduating college. Seriously, I don’t know what happened. One morning, I woke up an remembered that I love owning tons and tons of beautiful books and pow, now I have dozens of unread paperbacks sitting around on top of several very weighty art books that I haven’t had time to touch. But I will! Especially the giant, expensive and very, very beautiful book I bought on the history of Art Nouveau. Must write this is my nonexistant to-do list (must make to-do list…) stop spending money, read the books you already have already. Maybe if I wrote it 100 times it would help?

Probably not, because I just ordered yet another art book. However, I think that Paper Cutting: Contemporary Artists, Timeless Craft will most defiantly be very inspiring and helpful in my quest to become inspired and start making more stationary. I recently helped Miss Boston make about 9,000,000 thank-you-notes, a task that almost drove me to commit hari kari with my crafting scissors. And left my hands filled with many little cuts from the X-acto knife that have been torturing me in the most unpleasant way (minorly, but with great vigor).

On an unrelated note, searching for the above image lead me to discover the publisher’s blog, which I really like. From the brief time I spent interning at HMH, I know that more and more publishers are trying to get in on the social media scene, with really mixed results. The people at Workman are funny, but a bit random. The Chronicle blog stands out because of their gorgeous pictures. HMH has some good Tumblrs—I particularly like their Literature in Translation one—but sometimes they can be a tiny bit boring. Though I haven’t hit on any that I plan on checking daily, it seems like this could be a cool place to get interesting tidbits of information to throw around when you’re drunk (especially if you’re drunk at a literary party). Do libraries have blogs? I would also like to read that. Not enough to do a Google search, obviously, but if there is a great library Tumblr out there, I hope it comes to me.

The other day, I read On Beauty, which is a book I’ve had for a long time but never really bothered to read. I know I’m exceptionally late to the party here, but I feel the need to say that it was really quite good. It’s exactly the kind of book that makes me simultaneously want to open up my laptop and start writing a novel, and despair that I will never, ever, no matter how much I write or how hard I work, be that good. But also, it’s really lovely and worth reading.

Zadie Smith’s story of academia and infidelity also reminded me of another book I read recently that I loved: Lit, by Mary Karr. Also set in Cambridge and also about the perils of too much thinking, it differed from Beauty in that it was a memoir of Karr’s days as an alcoholic. Though I could probably write a (really awful) book called Alcoholics I Have Known, none of my boozers ever quite entered into Karr-territory (save for one, but I don’t want to think about that too hard). Lit resides in that scary, almost mythical land of delirium tremors and detox, which actually sounds more depressing than it is. Like Smith, Karr is a terrifically gorgeous writer made all the more enviable by the fact that she’s funny, too.

So those are my Massachusetts-themed book recommendations. I will need to find another one to read soon, since I’m going to be spending the weekend out in the Berkshires looking at treehouses. Yes!