December 2, 2005

Homage to my books

Wow, I haven’t written anything in a while… I have been just plain busy— with client work, the holidays that just passed and the ones that are coming, my sister’s wedding, and a random inspiration to do major renovations in our house. That last point is what I want to highlight here, since it is a little too exciting for me…

I guess you could call me bookish

I love books. I read every night before I go to sleep, and sometimes on the weekends I’ll stay in bed reading for a couple of hours before I get up. I have been doing this since I was about 3 years old. I also have slight pack-rat tendencies, and a husband that is also a reader, leading to quite an accumulation of books. I don’t consider this a problem, because I love to go back to them and leaf through them and re-read them and think about them. The only real problem is that they end up taking up a lot of space. We ended up hitting critical mass with books last weekend, with all our shelves full and random piles of books lying everywhere, as documented in this Flickr set. The logical thing would be to get rid of some of them, but I could never bring myself to do that. Even the crappy pulp novels are worth something to me— have some intangible essence that makes getting rid of them seem like it would be evil. So instead, we spent a couple days ripping out a built-in buffet in our house and converting it to a built in bookcase. Those that know our cooking habits can attest that this is a much better use of valuable redwood and Douglas fir for us. The buffet was full of old papers and receipts… The new bookcase kicks ass, and holds about 300 books. The whole middle shelf is the sciency” section, and the top is photos” and classics”. Bottom left is knitting” and the rest is just random. Computery” books, textbooks, field guides, reference books, and books in Spanish are in the office. (I double-majored in Biology and Spanish Literature in college, so I have a good collection of Spanish books.) The best part of the whole experience was having an excuse to look at all our books while we were organizing them. I found some awesome things that I had forgotten about, like my original comic book of Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land”. I am going to put some photos up of this on Flickr sometime soon. It was also nice that after the NPR story about Wallace Stevens on Tuesday, I could go right to my copy of The Poem at the End of the Mind” and page through it, without having to search all over the house. Anyway, now the books are organized and I found some inspiration. I also figured out what I’m going to do with Jangly Ganglia, so expect that sometime in the not-too-distant future.


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