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.

a perfect(ly exhausting) weekend

The weekend previous to last, I started unpacking my books.


We were sort of at an impasse in terms of packing: most of the kitchen was done, but some things had to wait until we unpacked the living/dining room, because there was no room in the kitchen. But we couldn't unpack the living/dining room because of all the boxes, and the boxes had nowhere to go because inside the boxes were books, and the books were to go on bookshelves that had not been put in place because the walls were blocked by boxes. Of books.

In theory this could be solved by moving the majority of the books upstairs, to where they belonged, but the sunroom-cum-library was full of tools and the den (through which one had to go before reaching the sunroom) was still in the process of being painted.

So we did more Towers of Hanoi maneuvres and managed to get the two bookshelves flanking the fireplace up, and I unpacked that, but it was difficult because it turns out I have a lot of books (no, really?), and it's hard to corral sets of things when you don't know where said sets are. And while it seemed like I had done a reasonable job — at the beginning, anyway — of labelling my boxes, I had somehow thought that labelling a box full of English and World Literature anthologies and Agatha Christie novels "Books. EngLit (mostly)" would be helpful, and ... it's really not. (Don't even get me started on the ones that say, simply, "Books." Books? Really?)

Anyway, much as I love unpacking books (and I really, really do), the bathroom last week was much more exciting.


But this weekend, Pierre finished painting the den, above, and he helped me organize the tools and clean up in the sunroom, and so we hauled the very heavy boxes of Ikea upstairs and I built The Library:

View from the right of the door
View from the left of the door
There are seven bookshelves in there, plus the desk, all gloriously empty. Well, were. Some of them have books in them now, and it kind of looks like a lending library had the stomach flu and barfed all over the room. In a good way.

Meanwhile, I had a little bit of time and managed to get some adorable bowls from Anthropologie:

Yes, of course they're blue.
And Pierre had a little bit of time and got me a prezzie:


Which will explain why I will suddenly and inexplicably fall behind on unpacking this week. And possibly next. (Yes, it is beautiful. Also: squee.)

packing

So, as predicted, I have been packing. Which is really kind of boring, and not very interesting to write about. One point of interest, though: I thought that I would be able to fit most (if not all) of my books into maybe 5 banker's boxes.

Well, I packed those 5 boxes, and this is what the main bookshelf looked like:


I may have underestimated the size of my library a little. Granted, a lot of those 5 initial boxes had books which were not on this shelf (which is really only about a quarter of the entire collection), but I still thought I would make much more of a dent.

(Yes, there is yarn up on that shelf. I have been filling the top third of the bankers' boxes with yarn, because it's light and fluffy; if I fully packed every box with books, the boxes will break. Ask me how I know.)

I'm up to 12 boxes now, and it's starting to look a little sparser. Not empty, mind. Just sparse. I think another 5 will do it. Or possibly 10.

Meanwhile, the apartment has become a complete maze of boxes, both empty and packed.


I can't believe I'm going to have to live like this for another month or so. The cats are loving it, though.


Weirdos.

So I think, in about three weeks, this blog is going to turn into a renovation blog. It'll be fun. You'll see. There's gonna be demolition involved. I'm hyperventilating thinking about it already.

requiem for a paperback

Last night, as I was waiting for the subway at Glencairn, pages xvii to xxiv of Marilyn Butler's excellent introduction to Mansfield Park fell out of my book and scattered themselves on the platform.

I think it may finally be time to replace that book.

I love that book. I can almost precisely date its acquisition — September, 1998. I gave my first university-level lecture on that book, wrote my M.A. on it. My first (and only) academic conference paper was on interiority in Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre. It was a good book. Just not, I guess, very sturdy.

---

I think I was lucky that that was yesterday, and not today. At least the platform was dry.

I thought about taking the camera in to work today to document the first winter storm of the season, but decided against it as the snow wasn't pretty — icy and partially melted, the opposite of powder. And then it was raining heavily when I finally made it in to work, so most of the snow is gone anyhow. I'm glad it's warm, I hate the cold, but I think I'd have more respect for the season if it were actually winter. Right now it's just indecisive.

stash management

A few months ago, a friend who worked at a library told me that they were selling some of their card catalogues.

I bought one.


In retrospect, that might have been a tad ... premature. It is large, and my apartment is small. But I'd wanted one forever, so we brought it home. And there it has sat, dominating my living room and doing nothing whatsoever, for the past few months.

We are planning on refinishing it and turning it into a cabinet for my printmaking supplies, including large rolls of paper. I have no idea how we're going to do that, exactly, but that's the plan. For now though, it sits there. Empty. Hulking.

Yesterday, I had a thought: I have this big cabinet with lots of little drawers. I have lots of yarn, especially sock yarn, that comes in individually small skeins that can fit into little drawers. One is empty, and one is taking up space. And so, voilà:


The new location for most of my yarn stash. There's the Dream in Colour Smoochy drawer, the Socks that Rock lightweight drawer, and my personal favourite, the bright blue Malabrigo drawer. Because everyone needs bright blue Malabrigo, no?


Sadly, I didn't have enough Handmaiden Casbah to give it its own drawer. (That's a beautiful purple Dyed in the Wool sitting behind it.) That will have to be fixed. (And no, that's not the entire stash. Ha. That's not even the entire sock yarn stash.)

I was very proud of myself for finding such an ingenious solution. Or rather, I was proud until I opened the middle section of the card catalog ...


... and discovered that my husband had already beaten me to it.

A new beginning

So it turns out, and this probably won't come as a surprise to anyone, that I am crap at updating regularly. Thing is, I am both a little bit obsessive and easily distracted. Which means that I will do something very intently for a few weeks and then move on to something else, which is a problem if I've already started a blog writing about the first something, since I'm no longer doing it in an obsessive kind of way. I no longer, for instance, manage to finish a complicated sock pattern in a week. Now it takes me two — but really only because I've moved on to sweaters. Or printmaking (not with yarn). You see?

So my solution, this time, is not to start a blog about knitting sweaters, or printmaking, or whatever else I happen to be doing; my solution now is to just write about everything in one place. Specifically, this place. This means that I will no longer have three separate blogs about three separate topics, and also makes it likelier that I will update more than semi-annually. These are good things.

And now, let me give you a photo and a question:



A friend recently visited our apartment and, while standing in front of these very bookshelves, asked if I still bought physical books. This picture encompasses roughly a third of the collection crammed into our little 800 sq.ft. apartment, so let me ask you:

Does this really look like the library of a girl who doesn't buy books?