Book shelves series #45, forty-fifth Sunday of 2012
Yon shelf, murky, dim:
Homeboy on the end, once my parents’, tschotchke of time in ’80s South Africa, used to work as a bookend, now he just hangs out on this double-booked shelf.
Front layer:
Back layer, including a number of volumes (to be clear: Chabon, Martel, Diaz, Eugenides) I should just trade in.
(Also: I hate this project and wish I’d never started it).
Don’t hate it, I enjoy looking at other people’s bookshelves!
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Reblogged this on that girl lyssa.
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You hate this project! I’m so sorry. I saw your remark just as I was trying to send your bookshelf to my friend, to say that *this* is what Kindle cannot replace. This standing in front of a bookshelf (mine or yours) and recognizing old friends, each with their own personality and history, intimately known and mostly loved. I spend too much time doing that. The library thinks I’m nuts – I can spend hours looking at the stacks, whereas others are in and out with their books in ten minutes. In one of PD James’s books, spending hours in a public library is given as an alibi and rejected by no less a literary character as Adam Dalgleish. I find a kindred spirit (at last!) in your project. Nonetheless, if you hate it then maybe its term is finished and I thank you for what you gave.
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FWIW, I look forward to this every week. I absolutely love looking at other people’s bookshelves.
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Thanks for the kind words, all—You know, I didn’t even remember writing the last parenthetical note. I was not exactly sober as I put the piece together Saturday night. The whole weekly schedule I imposed on myself has sometimes led me to feel more rushed than I should.
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I think there is a direct correlation between the bookshelf posts that include an “I hate this project” note and the relative sobriety of it’s author. If there’s a next time, we should immediately begin assessing sobriety on a scale from Salman Rushdie to Ernest Hemingway. Anything on the Hemingway side should allow us to breathe a sigh of relief.
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That bottle seems like an appropriate end piece to the Pound book. Nice touch.
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