Tag: Things on My Shelf

Journal

Mmm, new book smell

I don’t normally buy remaindered books, what with the fact that they’re financially dead for the authors who wrote them and I’m in favour of authors getting paid, but today I made an exception based on the grounds of being very broke and finding a trio of Hard Case Crime books at a very low price while shopping for groceries. The part of me that feels bad about buying remaindered books wages a quiet war with the part of me that thinks picking up pulpy, hard-boiled paperbacks in a supermarket is one of those experiences I thought lost forever. It confused the hell out of the woman on check-outs too; she had to be convinced they were store product, rather than library books I was carrying around while picking up bread and milk.

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Stacking Books in Piles

It seemed like a slightly manic goal when I set it back in July of last year, but my question to read 104 books in the space of a year may actually work out. I finished Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own this morning, which brought my reading total up to 74 books, then put together the final thirty books I’m planning on finishing between now and July 31st. They now live on my bedside table, a pile of words that can be beaten down day by day until I finally clear the whole damn thing. To make the goal I need to clear three books off this pile a week, which is a little less daunting than it should be because of my bad habit of reading half a book and getting distracted (and cherry picking stories out of anthologies and collections). There’s a lot of bookmarks already in that pile, which should cut the reading time down