Today, my lovelies. I promise.*
As I mentioned briefly yesterday, Adam and I spent a good part of Sunday afternoon going through all 20-odd boxes of books we have in our garage in our Annual Book Cull. As I get older I get less precious with the occasional need to reduce our collection; I now realise that there’s nothing wrong with borrowing library books or that keeping books on the shelves - or in boxes – unread while other people could be enjoying them is selfish and unfair. So this year I bid farewell to these titles: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Arabella Edge’s The Company, Victor Kelleher’s Into the Dark, Anita Damant’s The Red Tent and Iain Pearson’s The Instance of the Fingerpost (among others).
Also on these days I usually collect a small pile of books, my lost friends, that I pull out the box with great joy and declare I must bring these back inside now! How could I have ever thought to banish them in the first place? These are in the above shot. I was particularly annoyed at finding the Norton’s Anthology out there, as it is a VERY expensive text and it shifted in the box and a chunk of the pages got turned bent back a bit.
And yes, my lost manuscripts were there too. Those delinquents. As was 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, which played quite a part of this blog during some of the early days. And the Shakespeare? I know. Sacrilege. It must never happen again.
*This is not an actual promise.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s a huge pile of books… a lot to read and enjoy
I knew those bloody manuscripts would turn up – AFTER you printed them off again!
My Norton Anthologies (both of them) were carefully packed in boxes ready for our move two years ago and placed in our garage.
Unfortunatley, we had our move planed for the weekend of The Great Storm of 2007 in Newcastle and, you guessed it, our garage flooded the night before we moved. All my lovely books and my grandmother’s piano sheet music and did I mention my books!
My Nortons are now sadly water damaged but still kicking. They are placed on a high shelf to prevent further catastrophy (I hope).
I found a great link recently (I will search for it and send it to you) to a spread sheet where you can keep track of which of the 1001 (both past and recent editions) you have read. It gives you a percentage completed and lets you know how many years it is likely to take you to read all of them. Very cool in a geeky book kind of way.
Just called in to see if there were any more posts and discovered that my Nortons haven’t escaped the infliction of further damage – just look at my spelling! Catastrophe. There, now I can sleep tonight.
{ 1 trackback }