We arrived in the UK on January 1, after an overnight flight from Baltimore. There was no midnight announcement, no complimentary champagne; nothing. Clearly I had my hopes too high. So we’re feeling a bit cheated out of our New Year’s Eve experience and will be doing a recreated countdown and toast when we have houseguests over for this Epiphany weekend.
It was a low-key, relaxing couple of weeks back in the States, the majority of it spent seeing family and friends. We also made it into D.C. to see the new Obama portraits. Mostly I enjoyed doing not a lick of work. And I acquired books, of course: a secondhand and remainder stack that, after my trade-in of some cast-off books, cost just $4; and a few ARCs I’m excited about.
Plus a few ARCs I brought back from America. The Leung stories came out in Canada last year.
2019 Goals
I’m feeling restless in my career, like if someone gave me permission to quit all my gigs I would do it tomorrow. But, of course, only a fool would do so with no plan to replace them with other remunerative work. The year is likely to involve a lot of rethinking for me as I evaluate which of my proofreading and writing jobs feel worthwhile, and what’s taking me in the direction I want to go (not that I currently know what that is).
Life is awfully hard to plan out. Reading is much easier! So here are my fairly modest reading goals for the year, some of them overlapping:
I plan to reinstate the Classic and Doorstopper of the month features I ran in 2017, since otherwise I hardly ever read them. I’m starting with Annabel’s readalong of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which is just over 500 pages but also conveniently falls into one of the below categories.
The doorstoppers I have around to choose from.
I’ll make a second attempt at getting through some of the travel books and biographies I own, though I won’t hold myself to any particular target. At least five of each would be nice.
I’m determined to up my literature in translation ratio. These are all the books I own that were originally published in other languages – pitiful! – but I will get hold of more through the library and publishers.
Re-reading is something I undertake very reluctantly. I have friends who swear by it, but to me it can feel like a waste of time. Last year I re-read just four books: Little Women, Give Me Everything You Have, Crossing the Moon, and Diary of a Bookseller. In each case, on the second reading I rated the book a star lower. That suggests that, far from appreciating books more on a second reading, I have less patience with them and find more flaws! All the same, I’ve chosen four books to re-read in 2019. The Collins is a longtime favorite about moving to Hay-on-Wye; the Thomas is one of the books that first got me into reading memoirs. I’ve been let down by Lamott’s latest three books so wanted to go back to one of her spiritual classics; I’ve gotten into L’Engle’s writing for adults and want to revisit her most famous children’s book (which I don’t think I comprehended at age nine or whatever I was).
I have a bad habit of racing through self-help and theology books rather than taking my time mulling over them and fully exploring how I might apply them in my life. This was especially true of The Artist’s Way, one of my bibliotherapy prescriptions. I started out with the aim of completing the daily “morning pages” of free writing (though for me they were ‘evening pages’; I’m not a morning person) and each chapter’s self-knowledge exercises. But soon I’d given up on the writing and contemplation and begun just reading the book straight through, which is not the point of it at all. So this year I mean to go back through the Cameron and Rubin books more mindfully, and use the McLaren devotional as it is intended, reading the recommended Bible passages alongside the weekly reflections.
What are some of your goals (reading-related or otherwise) for 2019?
I’ve been somewhat cagey about the purpose for my trip back to the States. Yes, it was about helping my parents move, but the backstory to that is that they’re divorcing after 44 years of marriage and so their home of 13 years, one of three family homes I’ve known, is being sold. It was pretty overwhelming to see all the stacks of stuff in the garage. I was reminded of these jolting lines from Nausheen Eusuf’s lush poem about her late parents’ house, “Musée des Beaux Morts”: “Well, there you have it, folks, the crap / one collects over a lifetime.”
On the 7th I moved my mom into her new retirement community, and in my two brief spells back at the house I was busy dealing with the many, many boxes I’ve stored there for years. In the weeks leading up to my trip I’d looked into shipping everything back across the ocean, but the cost would have been in the thousands of dollars and just wasn’t worth it. Although my dad is renting a storage unit, so I’m able to leave a fair bit behind with him, I knew that a lot still had to go. Even (or maybe especially) books.
Had I had more time at my disposal, I might have looked into eBay and other ways to maximize profits, but with just a few weeks and limited time in the house itself, I had to go for the quickest and easiest options. I’m a pretty sentimental person, but I tried to approach the process rationally to minimize my emotional overload. I spent about 24 hours going through all of my boxes of books, plus the hundreds of books and DVDs my parents had set aside for sale, and figuring out the best way to dispose of everything. Maybe these steps will help you prepare for a future move.
The Great Book Sort-Out in progress.
When culling books, I asked myself:
Do I have duplicate copies? This was often the case for works by Dickens, Eliot and Hardy. I kept the most readable copy and put the others aside for sale.
Have I read it and rated it 3 stars or below? I don’t need to keep the Ayn Rand paperback just to prove to myself that I got through all 1000+ pages. If I’m not going to reread Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, better to put it in the local Little Free Library so someone else can enjoy it for the first time.
Can I see myself referring to this again? My college philosophy textbook had good explanations and examples, but I can access pithy statements of philosophers’ beliefs on the Internet instead. I’d like to keep up conversational French, sure, but I doubt I’ll ever open up a handbook of unusual verb conjugations.
Am I really going to read this? I used to amass classics with the best intention of inhaling them and becoming some mythically well-read person, but many have hung around for up to two decades without making it onto my reading stack. So it was farewell to everything by Joseph Fielding and Sinclair Lewis; to obscure titles by D.H. Lawrence and Anthony Trollope; and to impossible dreams like Don Quixote. If I have a change of heart in the future, these are the kinds of books I can find in a university library or download from Project Gutenberg.
My first port of call for reselling books was Bookscouter.com (the closest equivalents in the UK are WeBuyBooks and Ziffit). This is an American site that compares buyback offers from 30 secondhand booksellers. There’s a minimum number of books / minimum value you have to meet before you can complete a trade-in. You print off a free shipping label and then drop off the box at your nearest UPS depot or arrange for a free USPS pickup. I ended up sending boxes to Powell’s Books, TextbookRush and Sellbackyourbook and making nearly a dollar per book. Powell’s bought about 18 of my paperback fiction titles, while the other two sites took a bizarre selection of around 30 books each.
Some books that were in rather poor condition or laughably outdated got shunted directly into piles for the Little Free Library or a Salvation Army donation. Many of my mom’s older Christian living books and my dad’s diet and fitness books I sorted into categories to be sold by the box in an online auction after the house sells.
The final set of books awaiting sale.
All this still left about 18 boxes worth of rejects. For the non-antiquarian material I first tried 2nd & Charles, a new and secondhand bookstore chain that offers cash or store credit on select books. I planned to take the rest, including the antiquarian stuff, to an Abebooks seller in my mom’s new town, but I never managed to connect with him. So, the remaining boxes went to Wonder Book and Video, a multi-branch store I worked for during my final year of college. The great thing about them (though maybe not so great when you work there and have to sort through boxes full of dross) is that they accept absolutely everything when they make a cash offer. Although I felt silly selling back lots of literary titles I bought there over the years, at a massive loss, it was certainly an efficient way of offloading unwanted books.
As to everything else…
I sent off 42.5 pounds (19.3 kilograms) of electronic waste to GreenDisk for recycling. That’s 75 VHS tapes, 63 CDs, 38 cassette tapes, 11 DVDs, five floppy disks, two dead cables, and one dead cell phone I saved from landfill, even if I did have to pay for the privilege.
I donated all but a few of my jigsaw puzzles to my mom’s retirement community.
I gave my mom my remaining framed artworks to display at her new place.
I gave some children’s books, stuffed animals, games and craft supplies away to my nieces and nephews or friends’ kids.
I let my step-nephew (if that’s a word) take whatever he wanted from my coin collection, and then sold that and most of my stamp collection back to a coin store.
Most of my other collections – miniature tea sets, unicorn figurines, classic film memorabilia – all went onto the auction pile.
My remaining furniture, a gorgeous rolltop desk plus a few bookcases, will also be part of the auction.
You can tell I was in a mood to scale back: I finally agreed to throw out two pairs of worn-out shoes with holes in them, long after my mother had started nagging me about them.
Mementos and schoolwork have been the most difficult items for me to decide what to do with. Ultimately, I ran out of time and had to store most of the boxes as they were. But with the few that I did start to go through I tried to get in a habit of appreciating, photographing and then disposing. So I kept a handful of favorite essays and drawings, but threw out my retainers, recycled the science fair projects, and put the hand-knit baby clothes on the auction pile. (My mom kept the craziest things, like 12 inches of my hair from a major haircut I had in seventh grade – this I threw out at the edge of the woods for something to nest with.)
My spelling wasn’t always impeccable. (To be fair, I think I was six.)
My high school senior year project, based on a one-year internship at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
All this work and somehow I was still left with 29 smallish boxes to store with my dad’s stuff. Fourteen of these are full of books, with another four boxes of books stored in my mom’s spare room closet to select reading material from on future visits. So to an extent I’ve just put off the really hard work of culling until some years down the road – unless we ever move to the States, of course, in which case the intense downsizing would start over here.
At any rate, in the end it’s all just stuff. What I’m really mourning, I know, is not what I had to get rid of, or even the house, but the end of our happy family life there. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to that, or to my hometown. I’ve got the photos and the memories, and those will have to suffice.
Have you had to face a mountain of stuff recently? What are your strategies for getting rid of books and everything else?
Now, part of the purpose of my recent three weeks in America was to shed stuff – and I did, lots of it, but that will be the subject for a longer post next week once I’ve shaken off a bit more of my jetlag- and heatwave-induced sluggishness.
It seems inevitable that when I set foot inside a bookstore, even if my primary reason for being there is to sell back loads of books, I’m going to spot some that I want to buy, too. I had some terrific finds this time around, especially at two branches of Dollar Tree. If you’re not regularly hitting up the dollar stores near you for book bargains, you’re missing out! (I always check Poundland when I’m in town here, but haven’t found anything good for ages.)
Dollar Tree / 2nd & Charles stack (not pictured: four books from Dollar Tree that I’ll give as Christmas gifts)
Wonder Book stack (all bargain books, 95 cents each; one memoir on top and the rest fiction)
Dollar Tree haul #2 (the last thing I needed to do on the day before I flew back was acquire three more books, but I couldn’t resist these, and they fit in my suitcases!)
Free books acquired on this trip (three review books [the bottom two come out in October] plus a Rebecca Brown novella swiped from a Little Free Library)
Book-themed gifts from a family friend (pencil case and cushion)
My mom paid for a second suitcase on my flight back as an early birthday present. Even so, fitting everything in was quite the challenge. I was pretty impressed with what I managed to get back in my two cases, backpack and purse, including 49 books – a mixture of favorites I want to reread, signed copies, review books, recent acquisitions, and stuff I’ve been meaning to read forever; if you want to be technical, since the Baker is two books in one and the Updike is three, I actually got 52 books over – as well as a selection of mementos, gifts and useful stuff, a lot of which didn’t even make it into the photo.
Review books waiting for me when I got back (Red Clocks for Nudge; How to Build a Boat for TLS; the rest for blog reviews)
What can I say? I’m happiest when surrounded by stacks of books.
I find it interesting to look back at where my books come from, and how this changes from year to year. So far this year, it seems like I’m reading fewer e-books and more from various libraries. I’m also doing a bit better about reading the secondhand books I already own, but – like last year – the largest proportion of my reading is still review copies of new books.
Here are the statistics for the year so far, in both real numbers and percentages (not including the books I’m currently reading, DNFs and books I only skimmed BUT including picture books, which I don’t count towards my yearly total):
Free print or e-copy from the publisher or author: 45 (28%)
Wigtown is tucked away in the southwest corner of Scotland in Galloway, a region that doesn’t draw too many tourists. It did remind us a lot of Hay-on-Wye, the Book Town in Wales, what with the dry-stone walls, rolling green hills with more imposing mountains behind, sheep in the fields, and goodly number of bookshops. Wigtown is a sleepier place – it’s really just one main street and square – and has fewer bookshops and eateries overall, but the shops it does have are mainly large and inviting, and several are lovely bookshops-cum-cafés where you can pause for tea/coffee and cake before continuing with your book browsing. It rained for much of our trip and even snowed on a couple of brief occasions, but we got one day of very good weather and made the best of all the rest.
Wigtown seen from the hill above
Hillcrest House B&B
Day 1, Monday the 2nd: Six-plus hours of driving, partially in the sleet and snow, saw us arriving to our spacious and comfortable B&B by 6 p.m., giving us an hour to freshen up before dinner in the dining room. Cullen skink (leek and potato soup with chunks of smoked haddock); pork chops in a mustard cream sauce with roast parsnips, boiled potatoes and carrots, and mashed swede (aka rutabaga); and chocolate cake with gingerbread sauce. All delicious!
Day 2, Tuesday the 3rd: Smoked salmon and scrambled eggs for breakfast, accompanied by plenteous tea and toast. Off in the drizzle to see some local sites: Torhouse stone circle and Crook of Baldoon RSPB bird reserve. Nice sightings of whooper swans, pink-footed geese and lapwings, and a panoramic view of Wigtown across the way. Back to the car in the steady rain to find that we had a flat tire. Thanks to our foot pump, we got back to the W. Barclay garage in town, where they ordered a new tire and fitted the spare wheel. In the afternoon we drove to the Isle of Whithorn to see the 13th-century St. Ninian’s Chapel ruins and St. Ninian’s Cave. In the evening we went to Craft for beer/cider and the weekly acoustic music night, which, alas, just ended up being two old guys playing Americana songs on guitars.
Torhouse stone circle
St. Ninian’s Chapel ruins
Isle of Whithorn, car with spare wheel
Today’s book shopping: Glaisnock Café, where we also stopped for coffee and a tasty slice of courgette and avocado cake; The Open Book (run by Airbnb customers – this week it was Maureen from Pennsylvania and her niece Rebecca from Switzerland; they’d booked the experience two years ago, and the wait is now up to three years); the Wigtown Community shop (a charity shop); and browsing at Old Bank Books and Byre Books.
First set of purchases
Shy B&B cat
I loved seeing lots of Bookshop Band merchandise around. This was in the Festival Shop.
Day 3, Wednesday the 4th: Vegetarian ‘full Scottish’ cooked breakfast to fuel us for a rainy day of bookshops and explorations further afield. 12 p.m.: return trip to the garage to have our tire fitted. All the staff were so friendly and pleasant. They seemed delighted to see tourists around, and were interested in where we came from and what we were finding to do in the area. Mr. Barclay himself had one of the thickest Scottish accents I’ve ever heard, but I managed to decipher that he thinks of Galloway as “the next best place to heaven,” despite the weather. We spotted a local ‘celebrity’, Ben of the Bookshop Band, in the Co-op, but didn’t say hello as he was trying to pay for his shopping and had the baby in tow.
In the afternoon we ventured to Newton Stewart, the nearest big town, to buy petrol, picnic supper food, and another secondhand book at the community shop there. We retreated from the sudden snow for a scrumptious dinner of smoked salmon, black pudding and haggis (all of them battered and fried, with chips!) at a diner-like smokehouse. Back in Wigtown, we got a mainly dry evening to do the Martyrs’ Walk. In 1685 two Covenanters (Scottish reformers who broke from Charles I’s Anglican Church), Margaret McLachlan, 63, and Margaret Wilson, 18, were tied to stakes on the mud flats and allowed to drown in the rising tide.
Martyrs’ Stake
Super-friendly, super-fluffy B&B cat
Today’s book shopping: THE BOOKSHOP. I’ve meant to visit ever since I read Jessica Fox’s memoir, Three Things You Need to Know about Rockets, in February 2013. Previously based in California, Fox decided on a whim to visit a bookshop in Scotland and ended up here at the country’s largest. She promptly fell in love with the bookshop owner and with Wigtown itself; though she and Shaun Bythell are no longer an item, she has been a major mover and shaker in the town, playing a role in the annual festival and establishing The Open Book.
He collects postcards sent to the shop.
Badger, ladder up to Festival bed
The Bookshop is a wonderfully rambling place with lots of nooks and crannies housing all sorts of categories. Look out for the shot and mounted Kindle, the Festival bed, the stuffed badger, a scroll of bookseller’s rules, Captain the cat, and a display of Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller. Together we found £35 worth of books we wanted to buy – whew! – thanks to my husband’s niche nature books, and had a nice chat with the man himself at the till. He signed my book, commiserated with us about the weather and our trip to see “Willie” (Barclay), and gave us tips for what to see locally. You’d hardly believe he’s the same curmudgeon who wrote the book. Now that I’ve been to the town and the shop, it’s time for me to start rereading it.
Cozy fireplace room
The Scottish interest room
My purchases, plus a signature
We also perused the smallish but very nice selection at Beltie Books, where we made a welcome stop for a cappuccino and some cookies, and I bought a cut-price new book at the Festival Shop. (They stock books by festival speakers plus a curated selection of new releases.)
Day 4, Thursday the 5th: SUNSHINE, at last! After hearty omelettes, we headed to the hill that overlooks the town to get the best views of the week. On to Monreith for a charming coastal walk up to the Gavin Maxwell monument of a bronze otter. (He wrote Ring of Bright Water, which my husband brought along to read on our trip.) After a lunch stop back in town, it was out to the red kite feeding station about 40 minutes away – I came for the books; my husband came for the red kites. Though they’re common enough in our part of Berkshire, he was keen to see the site of another recent reintroduction. Wales also has a feeding station we visited some years ago, and on both occasions seeing dozens of birds swoop down for meat was quite the spectacle – though here you sit on an open porch, even closer to the action. We did a few other short walks in the area, finishing off with a sunset sit in Wigtown’s bird hide.
Main street, showing The Bookshop
Wigtown Town Hall
Maxwell Monument inscription
Maxwell Monument
Red kite feeding
Today’s book shopping: ReadingLasses calls itself Britain’s only women’s bookshop. They stock Persephone Books direct from Bloomsbury, and they also have a large selection of secondhand books. This is the best place to go in town for a light meal and a snack. We had delicious homemade soup with soda bread for an early lunch, followed by coffee and tiffin. I bought a novel by Candia McWilliam, a Scottish author I’ve only read nonfiction by before.
ReadingLasses
Unfortunate find in biography section
At Curly Tale Books, the children’s bookshop next-door to The Bookshop, we bought a picture book about the local ‘belted’ Galloway cows for our niece. We didn’t realize the shop owner is also the author! She offered to sign the book for us, but we decided that a five-year-old wouldn’t appreciate it enough.
Day 5, Friday the 6th: Full Scottish breakfast to see us on our way, and a farewell to the two B&B cats, including the fluffiest cat on earth. To break up the rather arduous journey, we stopped early on at the Cairn Holy stone circle/tomb and the Cream o’ Galloway farm shop for cheese and ice cream. Home at 7:30 p.m. to find something from the freezer for dinner, unpack and shelve all these new books.
Cairn Holy
Total acquisitions: 13 books for me, 7 books for my husband, 3 books for gifts
Wigtown is more than twice as far away as Hay is for us, so we’re less likely to go back. (It’s also a tough place to find a decent evening meal.) However, I’d like to think that life will take me back to Wigtown someday, perhaps for the Festival, or for a stay at The Open Book – though I’d have to start planning ahead to 2021!
What I read:
Bits of lots of books I had on the go, but mostly a few vaguely appropriate titles:
Under the Skin by Michel Faber was the perfect book for reading on rainy Scottish highways. I’m so glad I decided at the last minute to bring it. Isserley drives along Highland roads picking up hitchhikers – but only the hunky males – to take back to her farm near the Moray Firth. It’s likely that you already know the setup of this even if you haven’t read it, perhaps from the buzz around the 2013 film version starring Scarlett Johansson. It must have been so difficult for the first reviewers and interviewers to discuss the book without spoilers back in 2000. David Mitchell, in his introduction to my Canons series reprint, does an admirable job of suggesting the eeriness of the contents without giving anything significant away.
Shelve this under science fiction, though it veers towards horror and then becomes a telling allegory. I knew the basic plot beforehand, but there were still some surprises awaiting me, and I was impressed with how Faber pulled it all off. Keep an eye open for how he uses the word “human.” This has a lot to say about compassion and dignity, and how despite our differences we are fundamentally the same “under the skin.”
An atmospheric line: “The fields all around her house were shrouded in snow, with patches of dark earth poking through here and there as if the world were a rich fruit cake under cream.”
Between Stone and Sky: Memoirs of a Waller by Whitney Brown: For a TLS review. Brown, from South Carolina, trained as a dry-stone waller in Wales (where she fell in love with a man who wouldn’t marry her), but we saw plenty such walls in Scotland too. As an expat I could relate to her feeling of being split between two countries. (Releases May 17th.)
In the Days of Rain: A daughter. A father. A cult. by Rebecca Stott: I read the first two-fifths or so, mostly in the car and over our leisurely B&B breakfasts. One branch of Stott’s Exclusive Brethren family came from Eyemouth, a Scottish fishing village. A family memoir, a bereavement memoir, a theological theme: this brings together a lot of my favorite things. And it won last year’s Costa Biography Award, so you know it’s got to be good.
I also started two books by Scottish novelists, The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay and The Accidental by Ali Smith – though I don’t know if I’ll make it through the latter.
I’ll always remember a moment in fifth grade when I returned a book I’d borrowed to a classmate at the lunch table. It was one of those Griffin and Sabine-type books with lots of paper flaps and pull-out envelopes, and as she looked it over she marveled, “Rebecca always returns my books in better condition than when I lent them to her.” I still pride myself on how I care for physical books. I don’t write in them (except to correct errors), dog-ear pages, or break the spines if I can possibly help it, and I’ve been known to unfold pages and/or reshelve books correctly while browsing in a library or secondhand bookshop.
During the 5+ years I was a library assistant in London, my all-time favorite task was repairing books. Eventually I ended up as the repairs coordinator for our site, doing most of the day-to-day repairs and running training sessions for new hires. Repairing books felt a lot like arts and crafts and thus was fundamentally different from any of our other work, which generally involved computers, customers, or heavy lifting. And it was hardly costly: apart from special book-friendly glue and tape, the only supplies were paintbrushes, rubber bands and scrap paper. The most high-tech we got was photocopying missing pages from another copy of a book and cutting them to size so they could be inserted to fill the gap.
I later did a summer placement in the Special Collections division, where we never repaired the rare books ourselves. Those were all seen to by off-site specialists – for a pretty penny, so we only sent a few at a time as the budget allowed. I wouldn’t attempt to fix an ailing antiquarian hardback myself (though a friend once got me a copy of The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers to thank me for being a bridesmaid in her wedding – it’s currently in a box in America), but I often do minor cleaning and sprucing up on the secondhand books I purchase.
Here’s my makeshift toolkit:
(Step one, though – which just requires fingers – is unfolding any dog-eared or otherwise crinkled pages.)
An eraser: I erase stray marks and (sometimes) previous prices from inside the front cover.
Goo Gone: Do you know about this amazing American cleaning product?! It completely removes the remnants of price labels and anything else persistently sticky, and smells pleasantly of orange oil.
Paper towels: A damp paper towel is all that’s necessary for removing coffee rings and other dubious substances from a book’s cover.
Clear tape: I don’t own the library-approved brand (Scotch Book Tape), but for patching small tears on paperback covers or holding the spines of hardback cookbooks together, this Poundland purchase does the job.
Translucent mending tape (acid-free filmoplast) for using inside books: I found out about this through my library repair work. It’s sticky on one side and either glossy or matte on the other; you can see the printed words through it. I use this for repairing torn pages and reaffixing detached paperback covers. It’s made by Neschen and Gresswell, and can be purchased on Amazon.
Heavy books: I get out a weighty stack for flattening a book that has curly, water-damaged pages or a creased cover.
Things that can’t be fixed – or at least I have no idea how to fix them: A persistent cigarette or mold smell; booklice; foxing (the brown specks that form along a text block); greasy fingerprint stains on a text block or matte cover.
Are you happy to take your secondhand books as they come, or do you also try to rehabilitate them in some way? I don’t mind minor signs that a book has been pre-owned and loved, such as a previous owner’s name written inside the cover, a very few underlines or marginalia in pencil, or a left-behind bookmark or other memento, but I do prefer not to see the remnants of what they were snacking on as they read…
This challenge Laura (Reading in Bed) posted the other day is just too fun for me to pass up, plus it allows me to get a jump on my 2017 statistics. The idea is to look at the last 30 books you’ve read and note where you got hold of each one – whether from the publisher, the library, new or secondhand at a bookshop, etc. If you wish, you can also look at the whole year’s books and work out percentages. Leave a comment to let me know what you figure out about your own books’ provenance.
My bedside table (and environs): always a mix of secondhand, library and review copies.
Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism, Naoki Higashida: Public library
A Girl Walks into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Love, and Women’s Work, Miranda K. Pennington: E-book from Edelweiss
The Great Profundo and Other Stories, Bernard MacLaverty: Secondhand copy from Book-Cycle, Exeter
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris: Free from the Book Thing of Baltimore
Finding Myself in Britain:Our Search for Faith, Home and True Identity, Amy Boucher Pye: Christmas gift from my Amazon wish list last year
No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine, Rachel Pearson: PDF from publisher
At Seventy: A Journal, May Sarton: Secondhand copy from Wonder Book and Video
A Wood of One’s Own, Ruth Pavey: Free from publisher
A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, Aldo Leopold: University library
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Vol. II, M.R. James: Free from publisher
This Little Art, Kate Briggs: Free from publisher
Reputations, Juan Gabriel Vásquez: Gift from a Goodreads friend
The Rector’s Daughter, F.M. Mayor: Secondhand copy from a charity shop
An English Guide to Birdwatching, Nicholas Royle: Gift from a Goodreads friend
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnovich: E-book from Edelweiss
Unruly Creatures: Stories, Jennifer Caloyeras: PDF from author
One Year Wiser: An Illustrated Guide to Mindfulness, Mike Medaglia: Free from publisher
A Glorious Freedom: Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives, Lisa Congdon: PDF from publisher
Dreadful Wind and Rain: A Lyrical Fairy Tale, Diane Gilliam: Won in Twitter giveaway
As a God Might Be, Neil Griffiths: Free from publisher
Devil’s Day, Andrew Michael Hurley: E-book fromNetGalley
Interlibrary Loan Sharks and Seedy Roms: Cartoons from Libraryland, Benita L. Epstein: University library
Skating at the Vertical: Stories, Jan English Leary: E-book fromNetGalley
Master Georgie, Beryl Bainbridge: Free from work staff room years ago
The Immortalists, Chloe Benjamin: Free proof copy for Bookbag review
Jacob’s Room Is Full of Books, Susan Hill: Free from publisher
Slade House, David Mitchell: Public library
The Lauras, Sara Taylor: Free for Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shadow panel reading
Survival Lessons, Alice Hoffman: Birthday gift from my Amazon wish list
A Field Guide to the North American Family, Garth Risk Hallberg: Free from publisher
Our new (secondhand) bookcase on the landing quickly filled up with the double stacks from other shelves. Top: priority fiction; Shelf #1: fiction; Shelf #2: biography and memoir; Shelf #3: short stories and poetry.
And the statistics for 2017 so far:
Free print or e-copy from publisher: 30.11% (Wow – how lucky am I?!)
Downloaded from NetGalley or Edelweiss: 22.3%
Public library: 18.22%
Secondhand purchase: 15.24%
Free (other) = from giveaways or Book Thing of Baltimore: 6.69%
All this work and somehow I was still left with 29 smallish boxes to store with my dad’s stuff. Fourteen of these are full of books, with another four boxes of books stored in my mom’s spare room closet to select reading material from on future visits. So to an extent I’ve just put off the really hard work of culling until some years down the road – unless we ever move to the States, of course, in which case the intense downsizing would start over here.
(Releases May 17th.)
n the Days of Rain: A daughter. A father. A cult. by Rebecca Stott: I read the first two-fifths or so, mostly in the car and over our leisurely B&B breakfasts. One branch of Stott’s Exclusive Brethren family came from Eyemouth, a Scottish fishing village. A family memoir, a bereavement memoir, a theological theme: this brings together a lot of my favorite things. And it won last year’s Costa Biography Award, so you know it’s got to be good.
