Bibliophiles Anonymous

[Guest]

Og.. no cure i know of... just gatta deal with it.

i had to slow down the pace of my reading because my habit was more than i could afford. so, for the first time ever, i have tried to pace myself.

currently reading De Vincie Code. not my normal read but i am totally engrossed.

i love mostly any Chick Lit there is.. the silly, far fetched lifestyles of the 30 something appeals to me at this time of my life when things are so damn serious. Escape. They bring me out of myself and let me float.

i was once asked how i could read so fast and still be able to catch all the nuances of a book. i said.. when i read a book, its like watching a movie in my head. i open the cover and as the pages go by, the scenes develop. sure, sometimes i will miss little things, dont most people? thats why reading the same book twice isnt a bad thing.

i dont want a cure. i just want to be able to afford the habit ive got.

 

[Clare Quilty]

Clare, I know what you mean, though I find myself spending less and less at the chain bookstores though Amazon still gets a lot of my business...

The vast majority of my book purchases come from Barnes & Noble. Proximity has a lot to do with that. There is a huge B&N around the corner from my office. As circumstance would have it, there is never much of a queue at the Starbucks (FYI for those outside of North America; Starbucks is an evil all-conquering corporate coffeeshop empire) inside B&N. This is in stark contrast to the clusterf*ck that holds sway in the free-standing Starbucks (as well as two other coffeeshops, Caribou and Brazil) down the street. Adding to the lure of B&N is the insidious policy that allows one to take a book or periodical off the shelves to read in the coffeeshop. Those diabolical bastards have correctly deduced that often if customers are allowed to comfortably engross themselves in a book or magazine over a tachycardia inducing cup o' joe and a biscotti or four, they will end up buying the book on their way out--especially since you can purchase books at the Starbucks register (those clever manipulative wankers!)

What really draws me into B&N (both the brick and mortal superstores and the website) are

1. The 10% off membership card (5% on web purchases)
2. the aforementioned coupon blitz (on top of the 10% from the card)
3. The Barnes and Noble Classics (which offer trade paperback versions of classic literature for a pittance--typically under $8.00 as compared to +$15.00 for trade paper classics by other publishers)
4. As I alluded to in my previous post, I have a high degree of frugality with regard to non-big-ticket and/or non-durable good purchases.
   [/list=1]
   
   I should probably add, in the midst of this B&N shill, that I spend a good deal of time and money at an absolutely brobdingnagian used bookstore, which is housed in a four story tinder-box of a warehouse in what was once an industrial area.
   
   I rarely buy books from Amazon.com anymore. The B&N discount card pretty much put and end to that. I did, however, buy the notebook computer on which I'm writing this post from Amazon. I saved $200 in sales tax! (no sales tax on out of state internet purchases and we don't have any of that GST crap.) The shipping was free. They also gave me a $150.00 rebate (which for the first time in my life I actually redeemed and also a $50 rebate on a 802.11G wifi router)

 

[rosco rathbone]

My nemeses are the used booksellers who set up their tables near the NYU Library on Washington Square Park. They have all the old student books for cheap. Like I am really going to fuckin' read Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable ; or Two Spanish Picaresque Novels.

Always get books and more books, never get rid of them, unless it be to "loan" them. I paid 120$ a month for 6 years to store my library because I was living with someone who thought bookshelves were for vases of flowers, framed family pictures and Martha Stewart Magazine. And besides, "books are dust magnets".


It makes me feel secure to be surrounded by piles of books, read and unread. That's how I grew up, dust and all.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I've even started using nineteenth-century slang when I talk Hell & death!

---dr.M.

I've only read the first book in that series; but I was amazed at the way he captured the lingo of the time. He must have done a ridiculous amount of research and reading in the letters and firsthand accounts of the period and so on. The other book that blew me away in that regard is Cormac McCarthy's mighty Blood Meridian .

 

[Clare Quilty]

Ditto. I have 12 full-size bookcases overflowing and stacks of books on the floor of every room but the WC, bathroom and kitchen.

Am I to assume from this that you have a bathroom that is not concurrently a WC? Well, la-di-freaking-da, how positively continental.

My book collection doesn't begin to approach yours or oggbashan's. I tend to go through book purges every five years or so and rid myself of the bulk of my books. Conspicuously, these purges usually coincide with a move to a new place. Moving crates of books is the biggest pain in the arse. I typically give my old books (especially Unix manuals and such) to innercity libraries, which have very little in the way of current technical books.

At the moment I have three normal 6' x 3' book cases and one large custom bookcase, which takes up the entire length of what would be my dining room, if I was not single and free to hang guitars on the walls. I also have a small metal framed bookcase in my bedroom. In the bathroom, the back of the toilet serves as an ad hoc bookshelf. I'd hazard that at any one time I have around 1000 books--not counting the periodicals that threaten to bury me alive.

 

[Clare Quilty]

My nemeses are the used booksellers who set up their tables near the NYU Library on Washington Square Park...

I am green with envy. If I lived near Strand books, MOMA bookstore, Gotham Book Mart, St. Marks Bookshop etc, I'd have little time for anything else.

 

[snowy ciara]

RR said


My nemeses are the used booksellers who set up their tables near the NYU Library on Washington Square Park.


Yup.. The used emporium I mentioned earlier has a sidewalk sale every weekend.. If I manage to stay strong on Friday when I leave work, they usually get me on Sunday after church. (both are in the same area of town)

You know what's really sad? Last fall, when I went to the used University bookstore, I spent more $$$ on the books I didn't need for classes than the ones I did!

 

[Guest]

Like I am really going to fuckin' read Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable.
. . .
It makes me feel secure to be surrounded by piles of books, read and unread.

rr, the Beckett trilogy is actually quite funny (in that uniquely Beckettian Black-Irish black-humour manner).

I too get plenty of kissy-huggies from my books. As there hasn't been a body-cum-penis to share my bed in ages there are at this moment (I read and write in bed) about three dozen books on 'his' side.

anon, Perdita

p.s. And I bet you still haven't read Richard II.

 

[Guest]

Am I to assume from this that you have a bathroom that is not concurrently a WC? Well, la-di-freaking-da, how positively continental.

Assumption correct. Lots of SF old homes are thus equipped. I'm on the third floor of an old house made into three railroad flats. Aside from continental it's common sense to have the two facilities apart, cozy too. P.

 

[rosco rathbone]

p.s. And I bet you still haven't read Richard II.

heh heh but I can still misquote the opening lines. Ah, liberal education.

I last tangled with Shakespeare in the midst of a brutal depression last winter-my annual cycle. You know, tighten up, tone the mind, hit the books, improve thyself, and so on. MacBeth was my goal. A re-reading. .

Anyhow, it stymied me. I got so sick of jumping back and forth between the notes and the text that I gave up-after first just trying to read it and forget the notes. But I couldn't forget that the noted were always there, waiting to be read, and my compulsiveness got the better of me, I started jumping again, and finally gave up.

 

[Guest]

heh heh but I can still misquote the opening lines. Ah, liberal education.
I'm guessing you're thinking of R3 and the discontented winter; R2 is about the deposed king who tries to populate his mind whilst in prison (Pomfret castle).
. . .
Anyhow, it stymied me. I got so sick of jumping back and forth between the notes and the text that I gave up. . .

Too bad you gave up. I've gone through half+ the plays (always Arden editions) with one or two run-throughs reading all the notes (and books and articles of criticism, etc.) Nearly always on the second or third read (it gets easier the more of the texts I read) I can go through it without notes, kind of like getting to know an opera, i.e., I still dont know Italian or German but once I know the work well I don't need to translate the language anymore, the music is more important.

OK? ok. Perdita

 

[Guest]

for Roscoe R.

Beginning of Act V, scene 5, Richard II:

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus, 'Come, little ones,' and then again,
'It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle's eye.'
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endured the like.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Too bad you gave up. I've gone through half+ the plays (always Arden editions) with one or two run-throughs reading all the notes (and books and articles of criticism, etc.) Nearly always on the second or third read (it gets easier the more of the texts I read) I can go through it without notes, kind of like getting to know an opera, i.e., I still dont know Italian or German but once I know the work well I don't need to translate the language anymore, the music is more important.

OK? ok. Perdita

Well the good parts are fuckin' great, no question. Bubble toil and trouble and what not. Out damned spot and all that sort of rot.

Maybe if I had a different edition. My print is too small and to get to the notes you have to really get some eyestrain. Perhaps if the noted were interpolated in the text.

 

[rosco rathbone]

I like the last lines.

 

[Alex De Kok]

Well, I have the disease, but not as bad as some of you. Only six bookcases, but two of them share my little office where I'm typing this. I re-hung the door to open outwards and I have to enter sideways like a crab . . .

No idea how many books. Daren't count 'em. Most of them non-fiction as I usually borrow fiction from the library, although I have a few Heinlein, C J Cherryh (the Foreigner and Chanur series, plus a couple of singles), some Dean Koontz and a couple of Stephen King. The rest of the fiction are odd singles, although I admit to all five Harry Potter books, plus the three in Philip Pullman's 'Dark Materials' trilogy. Oh, yes. The complete works of Shakespeare's there, too, Perdita, although I tend to read the sonnets rather than the plays. I just love books. I could live without TV, computers and the Internet (although I'd miss you lot more than I'd ever miss TV) but without books? Never! Them and malt whisky. . .

Alex

 

[Guest]

rr: there is such a variety of editions. I have several of each favourite play. Some have columns with the notes directly adjacent to the pertinent text. Some have photos or illustrations. Sometimes I buy an edition for that editor's preface. It should all be fun though, eh? P.

 

[Guest]

I like the last lines.

Yes they are fine in themselves, but if you read the whole play and understand what it says about self-identity (even for a king) they will become more profound than otherwise. You must read the 'mirror scene'. P.

 

[Guest]

Now I feel I ought to say more about my library. It's not just numbers and stacks. I have one full bookcase on ballet and music with books on technique, history, biographies and autobios, photo books, librettos. When I want to learn about something I simply use books and one always leads to another few dozen.

I have a collection, maybe half a bookcase on pre-revolutionary Russian history and culture including lives of the tsars and tsarina (CII), Faberge, the Kremlin, Petersburg.

Literature includes English, Irish, Latin-American and Russian mostly. There is a Shakespeare bookcase.

I have sections on feminism, theology, world history, poetry, miscellaneous biographies and autobios, film, Motown, literary criticism, cacti and succulents, Mexicana, California, Venice and Vienna, photography, art in general, the Medieval, the Gothic, mysteries and detective novels.

Perdita

 

[rosco rathbone]

I have a large collections of works relating to religion, magic, the occult and mysticism. I also have on my shelves what I refer to as "my brain"--all the books from childhood and adolescence that were important to me. A lot of sci-fi and fantasy there. Some--the Arthur Clarke, the UK LeGuin, have been reread countless times. I don't read any of them any more, but I brought them from my parent's house a few at a time until I had most of them; because I was afeared that if they fell into the wrong hands that someone might do me harm by means of mojo. The rest of my library is a hodge podge.

 

[Guest]

Ah, rr. I like your sense of duty to "protect" your books. I feel that too. There are certain persons I would not let touch my books, to me they are like literary pedophiles. P.

p.s. I forgot to include my hodge-podge section.

 

[McKenna]

I'm not surprised to find so many bibliophiles here at the AH. I think it stands to reason that those of us who enjoy writing, also enjoy reading.

My most recent read: The Time-traveler's Wife


A friend tipped me off to a great site for book lovers called Levenger , "tools for serious readers." I think I could spend as much there as I do buying books.

 

[Guest]

Mack, I loved The Time Traveller's Wife! What an extraordinary read.

Now Levenger's, that is snobbery. I've bought a key chain, a paper clipper and some paperclips from them. Ha ha. Oh, and my laptop lapdesk.

Perdita

 

[McKenna]

Mack, I loved The Time Traveller's Wife! What an extraordinary read.

Now Levenger's, that is snobbery. I've bought a key chain, a paper clipper and some paperclips from them. Ha ha. Oh, and my laptop lapdesk.

Perdita

I always knew you had good taste Perdita -I'm just happy to learn I share that good taste!