[bksvol-discuss] picture description bog down

  • From: "Estelnalissi" <airadil@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:22:13 -0400

Dear Booksharian Friends,

I'm moving slower than road construction in two books. After so much time and work I would be sorry to give them up, but I have to face facts that I don't have the ability to see details or the visual endurance to continue trying to describe the pictures and both are very picture rich.

The first is a Portrait of Jane Austen by David Cecil. The title means portrait in two senses. It's a portrait in words based on extensive research and use of letters of the people involved, and literally a visual portrait as it is heavily illustrated with portraits of the people in Jane's life and the places where she and her family lived and visited. After months I'm only up to page 79. I've spent so many hours that I don't want to give up, but without help maybe I should. The illustrations show so much about that time, the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For example, there's a vast room, which I'm guessing, is 20 feet high. I can't imagine how they heated such a room, but I think it's there. I think there are 2 or 3 tiers of windows separated by impressive vertically ridged pillars with ornate carving at the tops. This is a beautiful book. The prose are fascinating to a fan of Jane Austen's writing, but the pictures lend a reality the text never touches.It is 206 pages long. Maybe someone with sharp vision could pick and choose some which pictures to describe.

The other book is Mummies, Tombs, and Treasure Secrets of Ancient Egypt by Lila Perl, for middle grade children. Here again I think the pictures show wonders not described in the text like how mummified bodies and Egyptian art looks. It's a Scholastic oversized soft cover book which is 120 pages long. The print of the captions for photographs is smaller than the text, too small for me. I'm only on page 12.

If anyone will volunteer to help with picture descriptions, I can validate the text in a few days.

And if no volunteers have time or the interest to take on these, what seem to me to be demanding books, then I'd be interested in what what those of you who can't see pictures think I should do. If enough of you don't think it's awful for me to skip the picture descriptions and get on with validating, then that's what I'll do, relieved of guilt and glad to complete validating within a short time from posting this letter.

At its best my corrected vision was 20/200 but as well as I was able I used to love art and described pictures to my students.In some books the pictures aren't that important, but when they are, I feel a void leaving them out or not being able to interpret them myself.

Advice and or help are welcome.

Always with love,

Lissi, suffering from over-renewal syndrome
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