Where do we find ourselves?
TEV and others have posted trivia around the meme Ten things I've done
that others might not have.
Reading them is an odd experience. You begin to realise how strange
experience is in the first place. I made a list and feel that it's got
very little to do with me. And when reading others' lists, this
curious sense of displacement wells up. What has all this got to do
with anyone?
� Have had my jaw broken deliberately in two places
� Seen George Best score a hat-trick (and against Scumhampton too!)
� Knew someone who was murdered and knew someone who murdered
� Worked in a submarine museum
� Read In Search of Lost Time three times
� Survived a ceiling fall in on me as I slept
� Spent over nine years on a casual contract
� In three days saw four football matches in four English counties
� Reviewed a book for a foreign national newspaper
� Have had a birthdate that's a palindrome and the same upside down
even when including my age
at 5:29 PM 0 comments
A fantasy fulfilled
When I first used a library, I wondered what it would be like if all
the books owned by the library were returned. What perennially
unavailable book would suddenly appear?
It was mere fantasy until today. In an exceptional snow shower, I
visited Brighton's new Jubilee Library. I elbowed the hoi polloi out
of the way and began trawling the fiction shelves. So many new books!
But not one I wanted, of course. Copies by the dozen of The Alchemist,
Vernon God Little and sundry Dan Brown-type trash. In the end I took
Oracle Night by Auster. Last time I read him was around the time of
Leviathan and I want to see what the new stuff is like.
Upstairs in the non-fiction section, I picked out books on Borges,
Kierkegaard and the history of photography.
Like most library users, I really can't be bothered with all the
non-book related stuff, but the self-service withdrawal is fantastic.
You place the books on a wooden stall, swipe your membership card,
press the relevant button and it prints out a little slip telling you
when the books are due back.
Reluctantly, after an hour on a binge-high, I re-entered the blizzard
and returned to the place where the books are to be read. Or at least
stored before they're returned and replaced by newer books.
at 4:59 PM 2 comments
April 2005 February 2005 Home
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My Shelfari Bookshelf
Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog
email address
Please contact me, Stephen Mitchelmore, at steve dot mitchelmore at
gmail dot com
Literary and other links
* British Literary Blogs
* ReadySteadyBook blog
* Spurious
* Book Depository: Editor's Corner
* The Literary Saloon
* The Existence Machine
* The Reading Experience
* Scarecrow Comment
* Guardian Books Blog
* The Quarterly Conversation
* KCRW Bookworm
* BookForum
* wood s lot
* Mountain 7
* Todd Colby's Glee Farm
* Three per cent
* Tales from the Reading Room
* The Bibliophilic Blogger
* The Penguin Blog
* TLS: Peter Stothard
* Mary Beard
* Nomadics: Pierre Joris
* Lenin's Tomb
* Dispatches from Zembla
* Waggish
More literary blogs
* Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella
* The Best of New Writing on the Web
* John Self's Asylum
* Anatomy of Melancholy
* The Truth About Lies
* Nigel Beale: Nota Bene
* Thomas McGonigle's ABC of Reading
* Vertigo: Collecting WG Sebald
* Un Arbre dans la Ville
* The Wooden Spoon
* The Joyful Knowing
* The Reader Onliine
* In Abstentia Out
* Jacob Russell's Barking Dog
* eNotes Book Blog
* Diderot's Diary
Book buying
* *Steve's Wishlist*
* The Book Depository - Cheap books and free delivery
* Booksprice - price comparisons
* Abebooks
Favoured author sites
* Maurice Blanchot
* Thomas Bernhard (German equivalent)
* Gabriel Josipovici
* Peter Handke (German equivalent)
* Princeton Dante Project
* Proust: Temps Perdu
* The Kafka Project
* Charlotte Mandell
* Noam Chomsky
* John Pilger
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