April 20th, 2006
“These books were alive, they spoke to me”*
My book fetish - especially when it comes to serendipity knows no bounds. Even when the teethering unread pile by my bed threatens to topple over and smother me in the night, I can’t help myself accumulating more. Recently, I went along to a sale of work with my dad. It’s an annual excursion we make together, me mostly with a view to digging out books, my dad there to find old records** and poke around in the useless bric-a-brac mounds. Mounds, that usually consist of mismatched tea sets, costume jewellery that’s almost cool but is totally unwearable, 1970s lampshades and sometimes some one new item that has been donated en masse (this time five rolls of cellotape for a euro).
After one circuit of the hall, I returned to the books, coming up with armfuls straightaway. I picked up Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, some Daphne DuMaurier (I still haven’t gotten back to Rebecca thanks to working like a robot of late), Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (I read it in college and loved it), Philidelphia, Here I Come! by Brian Friel, Close Company - stories of Mothers and Daughters (published by Virago and including pieces by Colette, Margaret Atwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath and Katherine Mansfield), Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Raymond Carver short stories, A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf, a 1950s Penguin cookery book (for my Phoenix-like return to cooking) and The Girls of Slender Means by the late Muriel Spark.
Shamefully, they’re not the only books I’ve amassed in the last week. I was working in town and the art director of the magazine told me to knock myself out with a pile of books they were done with. I came up with The Treehouse by Naomi Wolf, The House by Leland Bardwell (I had only read one of her short stories in this collection), Nick Laird’s Utterly Monkey, The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi (which the bibliofemmes are reading this month) and MJ Hyland’s Carry Me Down. I’m most looking forward to the latter as I interviewed Maria about her first book, How The Light Gets In.
And there’s more.
My friend Dave gave me a proof copies of Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience, The Free and Easy by Anna Haverty and Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man. I’ve got to get through some Chuck Palahniuk stuff for work so a couple of his books came in the post; I’m collecting the Irish Independent’s Great Children’s Books and I bought myself 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (which is totally addictive and I find myself surprised by some inclusions/omissions).
And today I just found out that I have to read - gasp - The Da Vinci Code . I’m looking forward to it in a weird way…
Perhaps that’s because I’m turning into a book glutton…
* The post title comes from a vocal sample (of Julie Christie in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451) on the top class new album from Tunng. It’s called Comments of the Inner Chorus and is out on May 19th on Full Time Hobby.
** We also picked up not one, but two, old turntables, for €2 and €5 respectively. One needs to be fixed, the other now occupies pride of place in the new recording studio (more on that soon).
April 20th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Heh, I’m currently trying to finish writing up the interview I did with Maria Hyland the other week! I’m at the dreadful trying-to-write-a-decent-intro-and-conclusion stage. The new book is pretty good, by the way.
April 20th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
Great stuff, I look forward to reading that. Will you let me know where I can find it?
The interview I did was cobbled together for Bibliofemme last minute, hence the Q&A format, but I really liked meeting her. And I found out that we share an obsession for Lorrie Moore’s short stories.
April 20th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Salman rushdie
*groan*
April 20th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
I’m a big Salman fan, or should say was. I’ve deliberately avoided TGBHF as I heard so many bad things about it. I read Shalimar The Clown last year and couldn’t figure out how it made the Booker long list. He’s been off form with his recent works, but Midnight’s Children is a masterpiece and remains in my top 5 favourite books. Haroun & The Sea of Stories (his short stories for children) are also seriously good.
Wish I could make that picnic tomorrow. We could have a good book natter and see if Richard still wants to start a blogger bookclub.
April 20th, 2006 at 8:24 pm
Hmmm. You’ve given me an idea. Does posting about all the books one is capable of acquiring in a ridiculously short space of time in any way assuage the guilt and not-enough-space-to-live-in panic which comes trotting along with them? I’ve always been prone to buying more books than I can read, and so is my boyfriend - in fact, he’s much worse than me, because every time I sit down beside our bookcase I notice he’s hidden yet another book of poetry or prints or philosophy (he goes for the Ps, I go mainly for the novels) up there. I’ve been meaning to post about this for ages. It does have its good points, obviously. And the bookshops here in NY are SO reasonable, particularly Strand and 12th Street Books, which is actually insanely reasonable. But you know, when you’ve only been living in an apartment for five months, and when it now contains as many books as did the houses in Dublin in which you lived for ten years….that’s a little unnerving. Plus, the rate of acquisition shows no sign at all of abating….
I know nathin’ about MJ Hyland. I’m looking forward to reading your interview. Plus yours, Stella.
April 20th, 2006 at 8:24 pm
I really liked The Ground Beneath her Feet
It’s a bit like my house except there are SHELVES of “to be read”…. Am still grinding my way through Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at the mo.
R
April 20th, 2006 at 10:14 pm
Rick, I want to believe TGBHF is a good book and I intend to read it, but I was warned off it by a couple of friends whose book opinions I trust. How are you getting on with JS&MN?
Empire, I had a feeling you might suffer from a similar ailment, I suspect Stella does too.
I think I posted about it because I felt I had to mention the books, sit back and just run my eyes over the list. Otherwise, it feels like I just went on a greedy grab trolley dash, purely for ownership and not for the the anticipation of the reading the words between the covers.
Maybe we should start some sort of book addicts club?
April 21st, 2006 at 6:15 am
Sinead,
On my Easter holidays, so trying to get some proper study in as the big exams approach…
Monday (the very first day of the holidays, at 8.30am): I bought another 6 novels.
Yesterday: the complete works of Beckett.
I’m going to end up with some form of guilt either way!
April 21st, 2006 at 7:55 am
I look at the pile of books I have at home just waiting to be read and cry with despair. A book addicts club yes, but also a support group.
April 21st, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Aaahh, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die - my husband has taken the title literally and we are working our way through them. I am a book-buying addict, he a DVD addict. He actually gets to watch all his DVDs though…
Kevin - no self-respecting reader’s collection is complete without the complete works of Beckett. Note to self: must buy some Beckett.
April 21st, 2006 at 4:47 pm
I’ve been hovering at the edge of this site for a while now but it’s quite intimidating for those of us who don’t blog to consider leaving our first comment. Unintentional I’m sure, but it seems sometimes like a closed shop- everyone in the pub seems to know one another while us greenhorns are nursing a pint at a table by the door and our friends are running late. (Then again from your end this is probably like talking to a mate on a bus when all of a sudden the person in front turns around and imposes on your chat: apologies all round. I’m not sure how I came across the site- either through the Londonist or else a random search on Kazuo Ishiguro interviews. Actually, it could have been a mutual friend of Sinead and I whose birthday is on Valentines Day and had a walk-on in that post). Anyway- couldn’t resist this one.
I’ve been weaning myself off the Harvey Pekar-ish constant need for more books and records with some superficial success for some time now. Five years of one bed apartments with the other half, I thought I was doing ok and had a nice rhythm going- six months of acquisitions would be followed by a cull and a lovely weekend in second hand book and record shops- depositing the old stack, buying a quarter-sized stack of what I can only assume are other people culls. After the first few culls the pain of parting with these objects lessens and you can convince yourself that your tastes (or at least the stuff the shops will buy, not the stuff that ends up in whatever the closest charity shop is) are not so obscure after all and now someone else will have the joy that that book it took four years to track down gave you. Space being at a premium this seemed to be a healthy solution and meant that the ‘must-read’ pile never quite got out of hand.
It couldn’t last of course- for some reason we got the silly idea that we could maybe buy a place and after the months that it takes to realise that that’s never going to happen we decided that we ‘needed’ another room and recently moved into a duplex. Easter weekend we had visitors who had the cheek to want to sleep in the other room so Good Friday was spent trying to clear a space for them. It’s only been six weeks since we’ve moved in but somehow every surface, and under most of them, was filled with books. Sorting the have read- must read- must reread from one another I found myself staring at the largest must read pile I’ve seen since the distant early days of college (Wouldn’t like to comment on other peoples reading habits- my pile is made up of Victorian and Edwardian fiction at the moment: Arthur Machen through to Verne and Wells, for reasons of research but also as a long-time Beckett obsessive’s knee-jerk reaction to what has been a rather underwhelming Festival- Charles Dance having breakfast for Sam, anyone?- little or no coverage of the meaty eighties work- thanks due for the Edna O’Brien bit on Beckett that nearly made me dive into the whole comments thing). Now I don’t think it’s altogether healthy but there’s an immense pleasure in this- one that I’d assumed was at least partially guilty- but this post, these comments….perhaps not. So I just wanted to say thanks (though I didn’t intend on doing it in such a longwinded fashion): Always good to know that though there’s a plague in the city, someone else got it first and it won’t be named after you.
April 21st, 2006 at 9:35 pm
ColinK,
I quite enjoyed that. (Though I was very, very annoyed at the manner in which you rudely butted in…)
April 22nd, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Empire, I had a feeling you might suffer from a similar ailment, I suspect Stella does too.
Heh, I am writing this at my kitchen table, about a third of which is covered with piles of books. There is another pile of books and catalogues at my feet. There are four sets bookshelves in the room. And this is just the kitchen!
I did manage to get rid of loads of unwanted review books the other day, thank God - my glossy magazine editor called over and collected about six boxes of the bloody things, which she’s going to donate to Oxfam for me. So that’s cleared up some space. Of course, those are the books I don’t actually want - the TBR piles are almost as numerous. And I’ve become pretty ruthless - when I was a baby journalist and got all excited at the very idea of free books, I used to keep anything I got which looked vaguely interesting. Some of these books languished unread for years. Now I’m much more discerning about what I keep and what I chuck away. And yet I still keep loads, and of course I can’t stop buying more myself. I need to build an extension just for the books!
April 23rd, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Wow, loads of interesting stuff in that thread to get to grips with.
Sinead, persevere and do give The Ground Beneath Her Feet the time and attention it deserves, I doubt you’ll be disappointed. It was my first salman book and i loved it. I then read his next one Fury and felt absolute erm…fury at haven spent so mch time delving into such a self-indulgent piece of crap. which is exactly how you’ll feel if you really how through with your threat of reading the da Vinci Code. OK, so its pretty light stuff really and won’t take all that long to read but you’ll still want to dangle Dan Brown by his ankles and shake him until the precious hours you spent reading that book while you could have been watching Woody Allen movies or something are returned to you.
please don’t do it, life’s too precious.
Oh, and colink, really enjoyed your first ever post. as someone with a mild phobia of computers I don’t really blog much myself but sometimes you just gotta hold your hands up and say “If all the other kids are doing it…”
Lovely stuff
May 28th, 2006 at 1:02 am
Hey, I just did a google search for the sample I just heard off Tunng’s new album and found this blog
My brother is Ashley who is in the band and I think its cool how much they are getting noticed!
May 30th, 2006 at 1:55 am
Best new folk band going, they are going to be really big. Hey all of Tunng (Nick Bates)