Sunday, June 24, 2007

Slackadaisical

Apologies abound - retrospective and for the future. I'm such a slack lady - but I've been busy with the boredom of essays and the excitement of trip planning. I'm writing from Auckland, New Zealand, but tomorrow it's off to Germany. Oh the excitement! If anyone is interested, email me at literaryacquisitionist@hotmail.com and I'll hit you up with my new travel blog address. Sorry guys, I am still reading on the run, but announcing a hiatus. Keep up the blibliophilic blogging work!

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Book bashers


Moving house is always great fun. After half a day of packing and stacking, my room looks messier than before we started. I’m going to stay in my mum’s shoebox of a unit before we head off for our trip.

Housing stack-loads of books is an endless comfort to my bibliomania – but presents hassles when moving. Kindly though, two of my brothers offered to help store and move my stuff. It’s a work in process; we move a bit here and there. Eldest brother came today to move two large bookcases, a dryer and other assorted junk. Some straggling books still remained on the bookcases so we decided to place them on the master bookcase.

I entered the room to find my brother and mum throwing the books onto the shelves. Frantically scrabbling to rescue and rearrange, I screeched: ‘Nooooooooooo, what are you doing to my boooooks?”

My beautiful Collected Short Stories of Saki is now besmirched – the cover’s all bent and manky. My David Copperfield will never be the same. Later, my housemates said the whole world heard me yell. I was distraught.

But a happy ending is only a page away. Early intervention meant the majority of the books are snugly packed and living underneath my mother’s bed. I know some of you are proud-owners of even more books than moi. How do you go about transporting them when you are on the move?

Monday, June 4, 2007

Tell King Tut I want my mummy

I miss my mum. When she last got in touch she was going to a sinfully sunny island in Greece. She’s on a cruise – complete with movie cinemas, swimming pools and restaurants - where dinner is served promptly at ‘whatever o’clock.’ When some folks in her social group decided to book a cruise, she jumped high and far at the chance to travel.


She asked me to come but alas the trip coincided with exams and assignment madness. With the gotcha gremlin of hindsight I now think I’m crazy for passing on this one! She gets back tomorrow and in amongst doing my essays (1 down, 2 to go!) I look forward to seeing her.

My plane reading is sorted, thanks to recommendations from fellow bibliophiles. I'll be cruising the clouds with my head stuck in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas , thanks to Matt. Satisfying two of my passions, wanderlust and bibliomania, is Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs, a travel narrative by Jeremy Mercer about his stay at an English-language bookstore in Paris - Shakespeare and Co (cheers tanabata!). Overexcitement bubbles at the thought of reading the YA book Holes . I will leave it behind owing to Bybee's input about its lack of page-number meatiness. Not ideal for plane material, but I hope to consume it quickly the week before I leave.

I must offer up a little confession at the risk of being maligned. I’ve never read Harry Potter. Horrified now? I'm willing to correct my backward ways and the trip would be a good excuse. So, if I get hold of a copy of the first book, I might make a substitution… I'm not sure about the Los Angeles aiport, but since we have a six-hour stopover there I could possibly acquire it there.