Heaven is a place on Earth

I have a soft spot for independent bookshops. Particularly the kind of second-hand bookshop I found just five minutes from my new office. It's a classic. There is no discernible criteria for organising the books, and you stir up vast clouds of dust when you attempt to extract anything. I felt mildly sorry for the scowling shop owner when I took my purchases to the counter. My manic grin and chirpy comments must have grated on his nerves something rotten, but I thought I might sound like a lunatic if I attempted to explain that even his surly demeanour just added to the excitement of my discovery.

I limited myself to three books, rather than the armfuls I wanted, on the basis that I would have to carry them home, but I will be back. I have to study the set-up for my retirement plan. I'm going to have just such a shop, where I will sit behind the till all day with a g&t. Ostensibly I will be working on my own novel, but really spending the bulk of my time glaring resentfully at customers, while a fat, ugly cat sprawls on a cushion on the counter. Obviously I will need to be stinking rich already, because there is no way such a business is going to support me in my old age.

Advance warning - anyone who so much as mentions the word 'Kindle' in my shop will be conked over the head with a cheap hardback, and the body stashed behind the rack of ordnance survey maps.

Lists

You may have noticed that I've added a new book list for the new year. You may not. I don't imagine that anyone is particularly interested in what I've been reading, but I wanted to keep a record of it, and if I wrote it down somewhere else I'd only lose it. I confess to being slightly disappointed in myself for only reading 58 books in a year. That's barely more than one a week. At the risk of sounding like I'm writing my own school report.......must try harder!

While I'm doing a bit of an assessment of my acheivements, I thought I'd go back to my '101 things to do before I die' list, which I posted in November 2009, and see if I'd completed any of my goals in the year or so since then. These are the ones I've managed:

34. Learn to knit - Sort of. I can't do anything fancy, but technically I can knit.
40. Get a degree - Woohoo! Worryingly the next two items on the list are to get a masters degree and to get a doctorate. Maybe I'll give it a few years.
83. Be kissed under mistletoe - Another technicality. No romance, just the decision last Christmas of a drunk friend to kiss every single person at the party under mistletoe while his girlfriend looked on in fond bemusement. It's an expression she wears a lot around him.


That's it. Three. Still, I'd already ticked off five between writing and posting the list, so that only leaves 93 to go. At the rate of three items a year, I should be done by the time I'm 57.

From tiny acorns, mighty piles of crap do grow

The cat is going a bit weird and excitable over my nail polish. She keeps trying to lick it and chew it off. Is there catnip in nail varnish?

I was supposed to be going for a walk on Hampstead Heath today, but it's pouring down, so we've taken a raincheck (ha!). This leaves me, once again, without a plan for the day, which inevitably leads to me walking upstairs, looking at the huge pile of clothes in the corner of my room and then walking away again. I don't have room to fit all my clothes into my wardrobe and drawers, which really means I should do a big sort out, but I don't know where to start. Massive quantities of it doesn't actually fit me anymore, but I'm cagey about throwing it away. What if I put the weight back on? I'll have nothing to wear.
I think I may have been a squirrel in a former life. Quite aside from the clothes mountain, I have endless stacks of books, which I couldn't bear to get rid off, and numerous odd containers full of 'stuff'. Stuff with sentimental value, stuff that might come in handy some day, stuff that just doesn't have an assigned place to be, so ends up in a 'stuff' box. And of course, having so much junk, I have a squirrel-like tendency to forget where a specific thing is. Staple gun? Yes, I have one of those! Erm....
Just don't ask about the stash of acorns under the living room carpet.

Mister Sandman

I bought myself a graphic novel. It's the first part of the Sandman series, and I basically bought it because Amazon kept recommending it to me due to my love of Neil Gaiman's novels. I didn't expect to be particularly enthralled by it, but I've found myself reading it a little bit at a time to eke it out, and I find the illustrations amazing. This is a bad bad thing. I'm enough of a geek already, with my Buffy fixation, fondness for World of Warcraft and complete lack of social graces. I don't need to add to the list.

Happy Mother's' Day

I think it's safe to say this here since I'm pretty sure my mum doesn't read my blog: Mothers Day bugs me. For one thing I never know if there should be an apostrophe, or where it should go if there is one. It's hard being a pedantic perfectionist when you were taught no grammar whatsoever at school.

Anyway, I never bother about Fathers Day since my dad couldn't actually care less. I'm sure he regards the whole business as a lot of commercial nonsense, and a waste of perfectly good trees into the bargain. My mum, on the other hand, tends to get a little upset if we neglect to acknowledge the day. After all, she goes to the effort of sending something to her mother, so there should be some recompense. My continuing state of poverty means that I baulk at spending upwards of thirty pounds on a handful of flowers that will be dead within a week, but luckily my mum happened to mention that, now that she no longer works closely with people, she doesn't get book recommendations, and the quality of her reading has plummeted. "Ah-ha!" I thought, "something I can help with". Librarygirl to the rescue! Not only do a couple of paperbacks cost considerably less than that short-lived bunch of flora, but I look like a wonderfully thoughtful daughter, who actually listened and responded. A quick trip to Amazon to ship off copies of The Enchantress of Florence and The Little Stranger, and I've done my duty. Literary flowers are so much better than literal ones anyway.

On a side note, my maternal grandmother actually got in a snit last year because she got a bunch of flowers from each of her daughters. Three bunches of flowers! At the same time! How awful. Apparently they should have consulted with one another beforehand to ensure a range of gifts. If I ever become that hard to please, just suffocate me with carnations.

Books - The Enchantress of Florence

Given that The Enchantress of Florence was written by the winner of the Best of the Booker prize, it seemed a fairly safe bet that it would be a good read, and even with such high expectations it did not disappoint. Rushdie weaves this mesmerising tale of magic and seduction with such elegant and evocative turn of phrase that every word is a delight. He flits between a Russian dolls' nest of stories within stories, interlinking them with casual skill, and cleverly drawing the parallels and mirror images which thread throughout the book. Sensuality is the dominant theme here, from the lustful and power-hungry characters, to the almost physical induction of the sights, sounds and smells of India and Florence. I think it's safe to say that, however many books I get through, this will remain one of the highlights of my reading year.

Books - Wideacre

I haven't read much historical fiction in the past. Aside, that is, from one summer in my early teens when I spent most of a long visit to my Grandparents' house working through a stack of my Grandma's historical Mills & Boons. I'd blame my skewed ideas about romance on that summer but I think...actually sod it....I'm blaming my skewed ideas about romance on that summer.

Anyway, I picked up Philippa Gregory's Wideacre from the withdrawn books pile at work on a whim, thinking I'd give it a go. Boy do I wish I hadn't. When I think of the things I could have done in the time I spent reading that book. I could have wormed the cats, cleaned the grout in my bathroom or stuck pins under each one of my fingernails. Any one of these tasks would have been more enjoyable than that drivel. Not for the first time I wished I didn't have the compulsion to finish every book I start.

If you're looking for a repetetively tedious plotline, cliched characters and  insipid melodrama then you will love this book. Incidentally, Wideacre also contains some of the most cringe-worthy sex scenes I've ever come across. This is not because they are overly graphic, or even due to the incestuous nature of the book, but merely that they are so awkwardly written as to induce a feeling not unlike a sudden sex scene on the television when you're sitting on the sofa with your gran.

Books - Possession

I can't decide whether I enjoyed this book or am intensely irritated by it. It is a book of halves, with two romances running parallel to one aother; one historical and one modern. The problem I had in reading it is that I found one pair of characters thoroughly engaging, while the other pair was strangely unsympathetic and tedious. I caught myself plodding through the historical portions, which came to feel increasingly like a weak storyline in a soap opera, flicking ahead through the pages to find out how much more I had to read before the modern part resumed. Having said that, the bits that are good really are very good, and some of the poetry and stories which Byatt writes on behalf of La Motte and Ash are utterly beautiful and enchanting. It's just unfortunate that the characters' motivation and dialogue is weak. The modern pairing of Maud and Roland is much stronger, although the caricatured and one-dimensional supporting cast is both distracting and annoying. On the whole I'm glad I persisted with it, but don't think I would fight my way through it a second time.

Books - Temeraire

I have a confession to make. As a library worker I really ought to know better but, more often than not, I judge books by their covers. In fact, I wholeheartedly reject the idea that one shouldn't. Millions of pounds are spent in the publishing industry on ensuring that book covers appeal to the target audience of the book. You can almost always tell at least the genre of a book by its appearance, so why not use that as a primary indication of whether it's worth the effort of reading the blurb?

I picked up Temeraire in my library because the bold cover caught my eye, then read the blurb and thought 'Well you can't go wrong with a dragon, can you?'. Actually you probably can, but Novik doesn't. I found myself becoming genuinely attatched to the wise but childlike Temeraire, and loved the fond relationship between him and his rider. I was very miffed when I went back to the shelf for the next installment, which had been sitting right there when I took the first book, only to find that some inconsiderate member of the public had had the cheek to withdraw it. Disgraceful behaviour.

Things that make me smile No.13

Looking through my reading list for the new semester today I found that my - admittedly slightly excessive - book collection could actually furnish me with all but one item on the list. I find it frustrating spending money on books that I don't actually want, so this is damn good news.

Things that make me smile No.2

While processing children's books in the library the other day I came across a picture book called There Are Cats in This Book by Viviane Schwarz and was absolutely enchanted. It is simply illustrated, with an almost non-existent plot, but there is something indefinably charming about it. I haven't been so pleased with a picture book since I dicovered Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed