andamu

I gatecrashed another party over at briggy's. I have this habit of commandeering the comment-space to post entire blog entries. But then again it is their own fault for making the stories so interesting.
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My mother had to go to hospital, so my sister, still a toddler, went to stay with my grandparents. I was attending nursery school, which meant I was occupied in the mornings, so my father thought he would be able to handle me the rest of the time.
At the time the public library building was undergoing renovations, so the books were being housed in City Hall (well, more like Village Hall, truth be told). I'm not even sure whether there was a librarian on duty or whether it was open to the public at the time. What I remember is being left in this paradise of towering shelves, with subdued light, and no-one in sight, surrounded by books, wonderful books. My father's office was across the corridor, and he had given me the best babysitter ever.
Later on my mother would help out at the library when they were in need of staff, and we would go there after 2 p.m. when school let out. I soon could run (most of) the show. Perhaps that is why, to this day, I am still a compulsive alphabetizer and sorter.
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My father always had one book next to his bed, another in the living room, one in the loo, one in the car, and one in the office. He never let an idle moment slip by without grabbing a couple of paragraphs.
I was hyperactive, wouldn't sit still for a moment. The words I heard second-most frequently from adults were "Slow down!" or "Calm down!"
The words I heard most frequently were "Put that book down and go and play outside/with the others. It isn't healthy for a kid to have her nose stuck in a book all day." Because circus could come to town, and I wouldn't lift an eyebrow if I could just keep reading.
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When we spent our vacations with my grandparents, I became used to being called to the living room when my grandmother had company. She'd be dragging closer the newspaper or some manual, and asking me to read to the company, to show how well I could.
:: I put up my current reading, completed reading, and intended reading lists in the sidebar on the left.
Obviously the list of books that I have read is not exhaustive, nor have they all been read that recently. Most of them have been read within the last three years, starting with a couple of classes I had in Comparative Literature.
"Aha," says the astute reader. "I am starting to discern the pattern here."
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After starting work, I went through a bit of a reading lull while settling in and coming up to speed. But then I began yearning for some good reading material, without a clear direction of where to start.
So I went back to the website of the academic bookstore, looked up the current set works for those courses, and started to compile a reading list. I extended it to some courses at a few other good schools, and have been steadily working my way through the list.
This might seem totally weird, but I like the fact that the works chosen for a course have a common theme or thread, examined from different perspectives and in different manners. When a course has been well-designed, there are multiple threads interwoven through vastly different works, creating an intricate, multi-hued tapestry.
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More than 75% of the boxes that I had shipped here from South Africa contained books. In my bedroom alone I have more than 200 books. We currently have somewhere around 1200 books in the house, I think, on a wide variety of topics. They have not been Dewey Decimalized, but they have been categorized and subcategorized, then alphabetized to the nth degree.
My other recreational reading matter consists mostly of mysteries. British police procedurals by preference. There is however no lack of resources and publicity for those, so it hardly seems worthwhile to put up lists. I'm more than willing to swap names and explore new (to me) authors within that genre.
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These days I tend to borrow books from the library rather than buy them. Although any book that have made a particular impact on me when I borrowed it will no doubt be bought the instant I spot it on a bargain table - the Gao Xingjian is the latest such example.
The links will take you to Amazon. It is convenient because there are synopses and reviews, and because it makes it easy to display the book cover image.
If you buy something, having been referred by my site, I would get some small commission. Personally, I don't buy books online (except under extreme circumstances - I need the instant gratification of the pages in my hands right away, so off I go to the library (or if I'm desperate, to the bookstore.)
In general in these times of inflated prices, it seems far more prudent to take a book for a test run, see if you get along, before committing permanent shelf space to it.