shh. reading in progress.

I've been on a reading jag. If you average my reading over a year (or whatever), it's a reasonably decent but not excessive amount; the thing is, though, that my reading tends to be very sporadic. I will got for weeks or months being perfectly content to read the same thing over and over, or to read only magazines and not books, but then I will get on a kick when I read three or four different things at once. I don't mind this — I think I enjoy books more on these flights than when I'm simply plodding along — the problem is that this particular one was unanticipated. And started after I had already begun packing up the library in anticipation of the Reno 2.0.

The room used to look like this, more or less:




(I realised halfway through my packing that I should have taken a picture; these are from last year, when I was setting up the room, so the boxes you see are actually the result of unpacking. It's roughly accurate, though.)

Anyway, as you can see: the majority of my books were in this room. I'm not completely unknown to myself, though — I had put away several books so that I would have something to read during the next month or two. The problem is that I was still on the slow road when I did this, and so in the last two weeks I have gone through almost all of the books I had set aside: Dracula; The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel; At Large and At Small (several times) — Anne Fadiman's book of essays; Anna Pavord's book of gardening columns, The Curious Gardener, also several times; Buying In, by Rob Walker; Jane Eyre, and I've started on The Museum of the Missing, about art crimes — that one is going much more slowly because it's too big for me to commute with, or snuggle on the sofa with; it lives next to my bed right now. (I had also put aside Pride and Prejudice — of course — but I'd reread it too recently for it to be enticing.)

Of course there are two more bookshelves downstairs, with plenty of books in them — including my beloved European histories and books by Bill Bryson — but this pile was supposed to last me at least a month. I thought I was being so smart! And of course the books that I'm craving are the ones that are packed up.

This is why I will never be able to declutter my books. I mean, I do weed through them — Goodwill did a sweep of my neighbourhood in March or April, and I put out a whole box of books — but I can't get rid of books for which I don't have a scheduled rereading plan (in the next three months, or otherwise). I love rereading things, and it's enough for me to know that I will want to reread it, because as long as there's that, I know that I will, eventually. But man, these things take up a lot of space, so it's nice to have a partner who understands. (Pd is on a reading jag of his own: he's reading through Agatha Christie — all of Agatha Christie, alphabetically. But he has an e-Reader, so I can't even poach them after he's done.)

When we haven't been reading, we've been watching hockey, and while we've been watching hockey, I've been knitting this:


It will be a patchwork baby blanket made of mitered squares — nine squares to a big square (that's a stack of them above), and four such squares on each side — sixteen big squares in total, so 144 small squares, plus an eventual border. I've done the centre four, and five and a half of the edge squares, so I'm about halfway.

Looking at it now, all I can think is: working in the ends in on this thing is going to be epic.