None But Eagles

Could Look Him In The Face

  • 15th
  • October
  • 2011

Perhaps I didn’t celebrate so much as take advantage of the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Independent’s Day. We visited two different independent booksellers this afternoon and came home with a large stack of books, only one of which I had actually planned to buy: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (a signed copy!). The stack also included Northrop Frye, Patricia Highsmith, Laurence Cossé, Josephine Tey, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. But I can’t read any of them until I’ve finished this novel for class on Monday and studied for this midterm on Tuesday and revised this pantoum and started the short story plot outline due Thursday.

Today is my mom’s 50th birthday. I inherited some of my book-love from her. We both love bookstores, especially with used books, but she’s more of a collector and I’m more of a reader. Her current obsession is collecting all of the Airmont Classics series, but when I was a teenager she would consult various ‘100 best books’ lists, label the spines of the books we owned with their appropriate number (with a different label style for each list), and work on acquiring cheap copies of the books we didn’t already own. One of the lists included an awful lot of L. Ron Hubbard, and Jane Austen appeared several spots below him, so my teenaged self was of course rather vitriolic about the lists themselves as well as the fact that my mother was taping labels to these books I actually wanted to read (Hubbard not among them) and revered as physical objects. I hoarded a few of those books in my small personal library in my bedroom, my hunger to read them overcoming my aversion to the labels. I gave them back when I moved out and acquired my own copies, although I miss the first copy of Gravity’s Rainbow I read and the Emma I tried so hard to read in 1996 but could not understand and the Gone with the Wind I read long after knowing the movie inside out and the Phantom of the Opera that freaked me out during one of my usual Saturday night babysitting jobs, after the kids were in bed. But my mom still has them, carefully organized, and I know I could borrow them at any time.

  1. booksinthekitchen said: GRAVITY’S RAINBOW gave you less trouble than EMMA? Never heard that one before.
  2. popscratch posted this