Not only do I not have enough shelf space any more for the books that crawl into my room for refuge, I suspect that if I give up my library membership this year, I will still have enough to sustain me for a good long while.
Is this a boast? Probably. It also feels like a sword hanging over my head.
What I've recently acquired includes (but doesn't entirely cover):
The Man Without Qualities, After Nature, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Cultural Amnesia, Magic Mountain, Elisabeth Costello, Selected Poems - Borges, City of Water, Columbus (Sabatini. Yay!), The Seducer's Diary, The Committed Men, the remaining Earthsea books I did not own, a Susan Cooper I have never seen and have left with my son (forgotten the name!), The Graveyard Book, Poverty and Plastic, a huge bunch of Agha Shahid Ali (but no, not The Veiled Suite).
Some of these books were gifts or exchanges of one kind or another.* I wish someone would now start gifting me bookshelves (this is not a complaint about the books I am given, though).
Dithering between the Musil and the Coetzee. Any opinions?
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*Still waiting for my YBT. You listening?
4 comments:
Any Coetzee other than Elisabeth Costello I would have recommended the Coetzee. As it is, I'd pick the Musil.
Actually, I'd pick the Ellison over both.
/wv: uplight
A friend has borrowed it! He's finished it, so as soon as I have time to meet him it will be sent across.
Is the Susan Cooper book the Shakespeare one?
It is very easy to dismiss Elizabeth Costello.
For me, this book with its eight lessons has always remained a cunning & willful book, and it examines some of the issues we have been talking about recently. And of course, sections of Coetzee's prose in this book have such brilliant rhythms that can serve as a masterclass for any playwright writing in English.
After Nature is superb.
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