The Spring Archive, part 3

I was amazed to be able to see the sun on the sea, to feel the spring, to renew my love affair with the world. (Anaïs Nin)

We've come to the end of The Spring Archives! If you missed the first two parts, you can find them here. I’ll be honest… I'm already looking forward to summer. Over the years, it’s become one of my favorite seasons, so I’m excited to start curating the perfect recommendations for it. But let's not rush ahead, spring is still gracing us with its beauty and everything is in bloom, so let’s take a moment to appreciate it. We’ve still got a few weeks left! In the meantime you can dive into some of my recommendations below. You’ll find a mix of books (including cookbooks!), poems, podcasts, music, movies, and more.

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As always, thank you for reading!

— Ella.

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listening — may playlist and podcasts

The personal playlist is back this month, featuring some of the songs I’ve been obsessing over lately. I’ve also included a wonderful podcast to remind us that nature is one of the most important things in life, especially after a long winter.

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• Why spending time in the woods makes you feel calm by Life Kit.

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reading — may books and poems

This time, I included a cookbook (not just because I looove Pamela Anderson) but because spring is when my cooking really starts to evolve and it feels like the perfect time to experiment. I’ve also shared a few poems and decided to continue the spring tradition of pairing paintings with books. I’ve included some new personal reads along with a few well loved favorites.

• Spring Poems — Classic and contemporary poems to celebrate the advent of spring by Poetry Foundation.

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• I love you: recipes from the heart by Pamela Anderson.

  

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• A Room with a View written by E.M. Forster.

"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..." Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?

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• When I Sing, Mountains Dance written by Irene Solà.

Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to “reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain.” He gathers black chanterelles, attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he’d harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.

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• Lighthousekeeping written by Jeanette Winterson.

Lighthousekeeping tells the tale of Silver ("My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal, part pirate."), an orphaned girl who is taken in by blind Mr. Pew, the mysterious and miraculously old keeper of a lighthouse on the Scottish coast. Pew tells Silver stories of Babel Dark, a nineteenth-century clergyman. Dark lived two lives: a public one mired in darkness and deceit and a private one bathed in the light of passionate love. For Silver, Dark's life becomes a map through her own darkness, into her own story, and, finally, into love.

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