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May. 25th, 2007 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
johnny9fingersThanks to e_compass_rosa for this http://www.librarything.com/
I'm finally going to catalogue the monstrous bastard thing that is my library: and I can do it online.
I may be some time.
But I can think of worse ways of passing the odd spare hour or two.
There are 37 shelves of books in my study. Most of them are double stacked, a few tripled.
The Music room has six shelves of manuscript/real/fake books. And five complete alcove shelves stuffed with twenty years of guitar magazines.
The six shelves of sci-fi outside my bedroom (some things are always destined for ghettos of a kind) are all doubled and overflowing, and there are three full boxes lying on the floor of my bedroom. And then the twenty or so books about my bed.
This is obviously all somewhat obsessional. My parents only have a thousand or so books: what happened to me?
Evidently a closet librarian or something. Probably nothing closet about it either.
The fruits of my bizarre efforts of more than thirty years.
This concerns me now because I have noticed that over the past eighteen months or so, I've stopped reading. I've gone from being a three-books-a-day man for most of my idle adult life (but included in this figure are the re-reads) to reading a book every week. The other odd thing about this change was it's prefiguring by my reading of text-books end to end, rather than novels and poetry. Originally I thought this change in my reading habits to be symptomatic of my desire to engage more with the world, and to add information and rigour to what in other respects would be a cavalier mind of the mayfly kind: clever, but essentially superficial - I now fear it's notice of me getting old and bored and cynical.
shoarthing mentioned, during a 'phone call, that he had been a thousand books a year man for most of his life, but that of late it had tailed off. I had to confess that, to my shame, I'd fallen rather further from the paths of righteousness than him. I'll be lucky if I manage a hundred books this year. And I know it's quality, not quantity that counts, but there is a thresh-hold of reading where the constant flow and processing of information acts like some mental gymnasium: either that, or immersing oneself in something to such an extent changes ones apperception: use makes master, in all things.
e_compass_rosa for this http://www.librarything.com/I'm finally going to catalogue the monstrous bastard thing that is my library: and I can do it online.
I may be some time.
But I can think of worse ways of passing the odd spare hour or two.
There are 37 shelves of books in my study. Most of them are double stacked, a few tripled.
The Music room has six shelves of manuscript/real/fake books. And five complete alcove shelves stuffed with twenty years of guitar magazines.
The six shelves of sci-fi outside my bedroom (some things are always destined for ghettos of a kind) are all doubled and overflowing, and there are three full boxes lying on the floor of my bedroom. And then the twenty or so books about my bed.
This is obviously all somewhat obsessional. My parents only have a thousand or so books: what happened to me?
Evidently a closet librarian or something. Probably nothing closet about it either.
The fruits of my bizarre efforts of more than thirty years.
This concerns me now because I have noticed that over the past eighteen months or so, I've stopped reading. I've gone from being a three-books-a-day man for most of my idle adult life (but included in this figure are the re-reads) to reading a book every week. The other odd thing about this change was it's prefiguring by my reading of text-books end to end, rather than novels and poetry. Originally I thought this change in my reading habits to be symptomatic of my desire to engage more with the world, and to add information and rigour to what in other respects would be a cavalier mind of the mayfly kind: clever, but essentially superficial - I now fear it's notice of me getting old and bored and cynical.
shoarthing mentioned, during a 'phone call, that he had been a thousand books a year man for most of his life, but that of late it had tailed off. I had to confess that, to my shame, I'd fallen rather further from the paths of righteousness than him. I'll be lucky if I manage a hundred books this year. And I know it's quality, not quantity that counts, but there is a thresh-hold of reading where the constant flow and processing of information acts like some mental gymnasium: either that, or immersing oneself in something to such an extent changes ones apperception: use makes master, in all things.
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Date: 2007-05-25 05:37 pm (UTC)I have book envy now. :D
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Date: 2007-05-25 06:16 pm (UTC)My godchildren will inherit them all, so the library won't be wasted (I hope).
I read your post about your 'second thoughts'. When it comes to such a decision, I think you're right, and I hope you're right. I wouldn't care to have something like that to fall back on in times of stress, especially if confronted by a student of the nastier kind. 'Twould be too easy to do something that one would later regret. (Though you might be doing the human race a favour, the law doesn't necessarily see it the same way.)