March 3, 2008
This weekend I read
This weekend I read Descant 139, and loved in particular “In the Time of the Girls” by Anne Germanacos, the “Synchronicities” section, and poems by Changming Yuan– “delicately hung is this earth/ a bluish cage in the universe.” I also read the February 7 issue of London Review of Books, and “Derek, please, not so fast”— a review of As I Was Going to St. Ives, a biography of Derek Jackson (to whom Pamela Mitford was but a footnote! I had no idea: “To call his carry-on goat-like would be grossly unfair to goats, who seem celibate, faithful, and even tempered by comparison”). The William Faulkner interview in The Paris Review Interviews II was stunningly awful, brilliant and profound. I will soon be starting to read Nikolski, and after that I’ll get to Brighton Rock.
I also began culling my library in preparation for our move. A shedload will be donated to the Victoria College Library Booksale on Thursday, but anyone who wants to can drop by before then is welcome to sort through the stacks. Assuming you know where I live, in which case you’re probably my friend, and I’d be happy to see you anyway.
It’s probably a good thing I don’t know you in real life. I’ve already gone an unwieldy stack of “to be read” beside my bed, a long reserve list on the library system, and no room left on my bookshelves (not just books places vertically, neatly, in some sort of order, but books placed haphazard, horizontal, where ever they’ll fit).
Congrats on your new place!
Thank you! And the only thing worse than too much to be read would be nothing. But I still would probably advise staying away from my shedload, for your own personal safety.
And the only thing worse than too much to be read would be nothing.
When I was working at Chapters a co-worker defined it for me perfectly, on a day when I was frantically prowling the fiction stacks. They called it “book angst.” When you’re not even done the book you’re reading now, but you know you might be that night, or the next day, and you haven’t anything to follow it up with. Not good enough to finish the book first; you can see the end coming, and you panic.
P.S. Wow, I’m re-reading my first comment there… interesting typos. I think I’m still feeling my weekend. 😉
I have a similarly lengthy, Panic, and yet I long for those soon-to-be-donated books. I don’t even know what they are, but I want them. Ardently.
I think there’s already a site called Bookslut, isn’t there?