The Poetics of Space

I checked this out more than once and was unable to get into it. I found it on CloudLibrary in a PDF and went to listen to it on my iPhone (two fingers down the center of the page reads it to you chapter by chapter), but it kept switching to FRENCH! I read through that particular chapter and then did some fiddling with my phone (in settings you can say something about not switching to another language, I think), and the next chapter read in English (even though there was French poetry sprinkled throughout my English reader mispronounced it and went back to the rest of it in English).

It was easier to get through then. I am not sure I would put this on 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, but it did bring me back to memories of my home in childhood and reliving some pleasant memories from there. It also brought me to live in the present moment in my own space in my cozy home. (Many people walk in and say how peaceful it is here. That is so nice to hear.) It also brought to mind how Proust waxed poetic when it came to living in the present moment in his childhood spaces in In Search of Lost Time. Those French people! 

It gave me food for thought but was not a book I would recommend. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

This book is beloved by readers and writers, thinkers and dreamers the world over, despite its sometimes recondite rhetoric and its always French intellectual élan. Metaphorically and metaphysically rich, Poetics follows the imagination into spaces that nourish and inspire it, “inside” realms within the world’s immensities that promise safe haven for the reveries that both define and enrich our lives. Bachelard begins with a philosophical anatomy of the house and a consideration of how inhabited space has a profound subconscious influence on how we perceive reality (houses, he explains, “are in us as much as we are in them”). Metaphorically and metaphysically rich, Poetics follows the imagination into spaces that nourish and inspire it, “inside” realms within the world’s immensities that promise safe haven for the reveries that both define and enrich our lives.