{"id":403,"date":"2017-02-15T10:52:46","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T15:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/?p=403"},"modified":"2017-02-15T11:54:34","modified_gmt":"2017-02-15T16:54:34","slug":"love-good-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/","title":{"rendered":"For the Love of a Good Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Most of my day is spent in front of a computer screen. I read thousands of words between dawn and dusk. But when I say to my husband, \u201cI\u2019m going to read now,\u201d he knows what I mean. I\u2019m leaving him for a book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I prepare for my dalliance with anticipation and care: a warm drink, maybe chocolates, the chair fluffed with cushions, the lights just so, the door closed.<\/p>\n

There is something deeply intimate about a book. It nestles in my hands for hours, my fingers tracing down its spine. I gaze into its pages with rapt attention. My husband, bless him, isn\u2019t jealous. We have an agreement: I sit up with my books; he takes his to bed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Books repay our devotion with constancy. The words are always there. They wait for us to come back to them, to read them again, next week, next year, half a century from now. The patience of books is infinite, but they are not passive. They draw us in, sharing their complexities, making their arguments, exposing their heart. Insistent and persistent, they urge us to listen, to let go, to put our mundane worries aside\u00a0and give ourselves up their words. To crawl out of our own skins and into theirs.<\/p>\n

What a relief! Books invite me to hear something besides my own thoughts. I am free to disagree, but I can\u2019t change what a\u00a0book is saying. It\u2019s still there, uninterrupted, making its case every time I turn to it. I can despise it or love it, it hardly matters. In the end, I have to accept it for what it is.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t care what my book is made of or what it looks like. It\u2019s what\u2019s inside that counts. A good book can change my\u00a0life.<\/p>\n

An Intimate Weight<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u201cI loved the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. I loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rita Dove understands. In her essay, \u201cFor the Love of Books\u201d the former Poet Laureate Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress admits to succumbing to the allure of books at an early age. We are both, it seems, promiscuous.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There\u2019s a word for this, of course. (There\u2019s a word for everything.) Bibliophilia: from philia (love) and biblio (books).<\/p>\n

Bibliophiles don’t necessarily need to own\u00a0the books they love, but they never want to be without them. Bibliomaniacs, on the other hand, feel\u00a0compelled to possess, even it means losing friends, family, fortune. <\/span><\/p>\n

How odd that the Library of Congress refers to book-lovers as either collectors or bibliomaniacs, refusing the lovely bibiophilia, which makes me think of being carried off by a young filly into strange and wonderful landscapes, muscles rippling under my thighs. <\/span><\/p>\n

A Body Without a Soul<\/b><\/h3>\n

Although the word is only 200 years old, bibliophilia in the form of book-collecting goes back to the Romans. <\/span>In A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books<\/i>, Nicholas Basbanes tells us that Cicero, who lived in the first century BCE, had personal libraries in\u00a0all his country estates as well as in his villa in the centre of Rome. Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the time, remarked that, like hot and cold baths, a library was \u201ca necessary ornament to a great house.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

But for Cicero, books were more than architectural embellishment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA room without books,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis a body without a soul.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Is a Bookshelf Without Books Still a Bookshelf? <\/b><\/h3>\n

As long as there have been books, there have been shelves to hold them close. The earliest were in the ancient library at Ebla, one of Syria\u2019s first kingdoms, southwest of the modern, beleaguered city of Aleppo. Ebla\u2019s library consisted of a series of small, almost square rooms with floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves for the clay tablets, each one facing out.\u00a0The Romans carried on the tradition, keeping scroll written\u00a0in different languages in different rooms.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cicero enlisted\u00a0Tyrannio, an educated Greek slave, to build new shelves and put his library in order.\u00a0\u201cNow that Tyrannio has arranged my books,” he wrote, “a new spirit has been infused into my house.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

But how did Tyrannio\u00a0arrange the\u00a0books? I\u2019m dying to know.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Delicious Library<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A few years ago, my husband and I spent a weekend taking books off the shelf to scan them into Delicious Library, the Mac app\u00a0that digitally catalogues private hoards of books. We soon gave up. How on earth could we scan every one of our 10,000 books? It would be like listing every bone in our\u00a0bodies. Worse: like cataloguing friends and\u00a0lovers. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I can’t imagine defacing all those lovely spines with stickers, not even colour-coded ones without numbers. For a while we tried subject labels on the shelves but they curled and stained the lovely maplewood. <\/span><\/p>\n

Nassim Taleb, the Lebanese-American essayist and thinker who makes a specialty of randomness and uncertainty, describes the human inclination toward organization: <\/span>\u201cWe humans, facing limits of knowledge and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

No map, he suggests, is better than the wrong map. <\/span><\/p>\n

The Rule\u00a0of Good Neighbours<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Loving books means making a home for them, a comfortable place to rest until you are ready to let them change your life again.<\/p>\n

Aby Warburg, the Austrian art historian, anthropologist, and linguist, developed a system of book-shelving he called \u201cthe rule of good neighbours.\u201d It is still used to organise the books at the Aby Warburg Institute in London, England. When the first books arrived at their new home, Warburg\u00a0gathered the staff together and told them:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cMy library must follow the order I have for it in my <\/i> mind, and therefore the volumes will be rearranged according to my<\/i> directions. And common sense and functionality be damned!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

My friend\u2019s father chose the same system. Over his lifetime, he collected 60,000 books, which he shelved in his house and in his office. When he died, all the books were shipped to a two-storey house built specifically to house them in the small village where he had planned\u00a0to retire. The house is furnished with bookshelves, squishy chairs and couches, and a wood stove for winter. A sign by the perpetually unlocked front door asks readers to leave their electronic devices in the bowl by the entrance and to enjoy the books within the reading room, returning\u00a0them to\u00a0the shelves for the pleasure of\u00a0others.<\/span><\/p>\n

As in the Warburg Institute, the books here are shelved not by genre or alphabet but by their connections to one another, because that\u2019s how the brain works, this book-collector said. He believed it was more conducive to the positive power of books and reading\u00a0if you could look at a book on a shelf and draw your own connections between it and the books on either side\u2014connections within yourself and within the room.<\/span><\/p>\n

I imagine settling into that reading room, working my way slowly through\u00a0the shelves, paying attention to the neighbours, letting each book have its way with me.\u00a0<\/strong>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1477364431886{padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 10px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 10px !important;background-color: #ededed !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: cover !important;border-radius: 2px !important;}”]<\/p>\n

What book has changed your life? Where does it live? Where did you read it?\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n

CONTEST!<\/strong> Tell us about a great book that changed your life and w<\/span>in 1 of 4 ARCs of Gutenberg\u2019s Fingerprint <\/em>from the publisher. (These unfinished galleys will soon be collectors\u2019 items, they tell me.) Everyone who enters a comment in this week\u2019s blog, or on the Facebook or Twitter posts\u2014using the hashtag\u00a0#GutenbergsRelease<\/strong>\u2014 is automatically entered to win. The Contest closes Friday evening, February 17. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Most of my day is spent in front of a computer screen. I read thousands of words between dawn and dusk. But when I say to my husband, \u201cI\u2019m going to read now,\u201d he knows what I mean. I\u2019m leaving him for a book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,38,9],"tags":[62,61,64,67,69,65,63,66,68],"class_list":["post-403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-history","category-history-of-reading","category-libraries","category-reading","tag-bibliomania","tag-bibliophilia","tag-cicero","tag-delicious-library","tag-love-of-books","tag-nassim-taleb","tag-nicholas-brasbanes","tag-personal-library","tag-rita-dove","invicta_simple_style_entry"],"yoast_head":"\nFor the Love of a Good Book - Books UnPacked Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"For the Love of a Good Book - Books UnPacked Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Most of my day is spent in front of a computer screen. I read thousands of words between dawn and dusk. But when I say to my husband, \u201cI\u2019m going to read now,\u201d he knows what I mean. I\u2019m leaving him for a book.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Books UnPacked Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-02-15T15:52:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-02-15T16:54:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Merilyn Simonds\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Merilyn Simonds\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Merilyn Simonds\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/22df72b6c19c900fa25746e759c324f3\"},\"headline\":\"For the Love of a Good Book\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-02-15T15:52:46+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-02-15T16:54:34+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":1371,\"commentCount\":6,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Bibliomania\",\"Bibliophilia\",\"Cicero\",\"Delicious Library\",\"love of books\",\"Nassim Taleb\",\"Nicholas Brasbanes\",\"Personal library\",\"Rita Dove\"],\"articleSection\":[\"book history\",\"history of reading\",\"Libraries\",\"reading\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-CA\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/\",\"url\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/\",\"name\":\"For the Love of a Good Book - Books UnPacked Blog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-02-15T15:52:46+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-02-15T16:54:34+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/22df72b6c19c900fa25746e759c324f3\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-CA\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-CA\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg\",\"width\":500,\"height\":500},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/love-good-book\\\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"For the Love of a Good Book\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/\",\"name\":\"Books UnPacked Blog\",\"description\":\"Merilyn Simonds | Writer\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-CA\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/22df72b6c19c900fa25746e759c324f3\",\"name\":\"Merilyn Simonds\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-CA\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/2197ee69152188ce5f751c726a38a921e7b357b9715f01bbf69739c8aab40df7?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/2197ee69152188ce5f751c726a38a921e7b357b9715f01bbf69739c8aab40df7?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/2197ee69152188ce5f751c726a38a921e7b357b9715f01bbf69739c8aab40df7?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Merilyn Simonds\"},\"description\":\"Merilyn Simonds is the internationally published author of 18 books, including The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Her most recent nonfiction is Gutenberg\u2019s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels, and the Lasting Impression of Books. Her latest novel Refuge was published in 2018. Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriliine Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay will be published by ECW Press in April 2022.\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/www.merilynsimonds.com\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/merilynsimonds.com\\\/books-unpacked-blog\\\/author\\\/merilyn-bl\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"For the Love of a Good Book - Books UnPacked Blog","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"For the Love of a Good Book - Books UnPacked Blog","og_description":"[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Most of my day is spent in front of a computer screen. I read thousands of words between dawn and dusk. But when I say to my husband, \u201cI\u2019m going to read now,\u201d he knows what I mean. I\u2019m leaving him for a book.","og_url":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/","og_site_name":"Books UnPacked Blog","article_published_time":"2017-02-15T15:52:46+00:00","article_modified_time":"2017-02-15T16:54:34+00:00","og_image":[{"width":500,"height":500,"url":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Merilyn Simonds","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Merilyn Simonds","Est. reading time":"7 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/"},"author":{"name":"Merilyn Simonds","@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/#\/schema\/person\/22df72b6c19c900fa25746e759c324f3"},"headline":"For the Love of a Good Book","datePublished":"2017-02-15T15:52:46+00:00","dateModified":"2017-02-15T16:54:34+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/"},"wordCount":1371,"commentCount":6,"image":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg","keywords":["Bibliomania","Bibliophilia","Cicero","Delicious Library","love of books","Nassim Taleb","Nicholas Brasbanes","Personal library","Rita Dove"],"articleSection":["book history","history of reading","Libraries","reading"],"inLanguage":"en-CA","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/","url":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/","name":"For the Love of a Good Book - Books UnPacked Blog","isPartOf":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg","datePublished":"2017-02-15T15:52:46+00:00","dateModified":"2017-02-15T16:54:34+00:00","author":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/#\/schema\/person\/22df72b6c19c900fa25746e759c324f3"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-CA","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-CA","@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C4ft61_UYAADYI6-1.jpg","width":500,"height":500},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/love-good-book\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"For the Love of a Good Book"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/#website","url":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/","name":"Books UnPacked Blog","description":"Merilyn Simonds | Writer","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-CA"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/#\/schema\/person\/22df72b6c19c900fa25746e759c324f3","name":"Merilyn Simonds","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-CA","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2197ee69152188ce5f751c726a38a921e7b357b9715f01bbf69739c8aab40df7?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2197ee69152188ce5f751c726a38a921e7b357b9715f01bbf69739c8aab40df7?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/2197ee69152188ce5f751c726a38a921e7b357b9715f01bbf69739c8aab40df7?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Merilyn Simonds"},"description":"Merilyn Simonds is the internationally published author of 18 books, including The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Her most recent nonfiction is Gutenberg\u2019s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels, and the Lasting Impression of Books. Her latest novel Refuge was published in 2018. Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriliine Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay will be published by ECW Press in April 2022.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.merilynsimonds.com"],"url":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/author\/merilyn-bl\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":436,"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions\/436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}