Link Collision

What is one to do when a weekly link party and a monthly link party happen to coincide?  Combine them of course!!

Reading a book, any book really, is my favorite thing to do.  If I have had a crappy day and seek some solace, there will always be a book involved to take me away from the world for a while.  If I am putting off some chore I know I SHOULD be doing, like cleaning, you can bet I am instead reading a book.  Going somewhere in a plane, train or automobile? Then I've got a book (or several) to take along for the ride.  When I was a little girl I would climb the tree behind my house with a backpack full of books and snacks and spend entire afternoons nestled in perfect contentment.  Suffice it to say that my love of the written word goes way back.  So what a perfect combination of blog hops/and linky parties than Thursday Favorite Things and Thoughtful Third Thursday?!

Pam @ Over 50 Feeling 40
Katherine @ Katherine's Corner 
Nina @ Vintage Mama's Cottage

I read several books this month...one leading into the next, but I was struck by some works of Virginia Wolfe.  I read A Room of One's Own and am in the middle of reading Mrs. Dalloway.  I have quotes from both that struck a chord with me.

The first, from A Room of One's Own, which is an essay/speech she gave on the topic women and fiction:

"for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be, fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."

The second, from Mrs. Dalloway early on in the book when she is walking up the road and looking into shop windows and thinking to herself:

"She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway."

I wanted my outfit to be a more modern day take on classic "strolling up Bond Street" outfit.  The brocade in the skirt reminiscent of the gowns of the day, the flower broach an adornment nodding back to the finery of the gentility, and yet still imaginative and "attached to life".  I think it was successful?!

On this blog, if no where else in life, I remain Alyssa.

Go see what everyone else is reading!