Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
My little library is taking shape
I’ve been working at converting our spare bedroom into a library/guest bedroom. It used to be a pink-striped nightmare (a little girl’s room, for parents who see their daughter as a little princess, no doubt), but we got it painted. Last weekend I assembled the bookshelves, and this last week we had a new ceiling fan installed. Nice dark blades instead of those peppy white blades. I bought a rug, too. It’s all coming together.
Today, we took delivery on more furniture: an easy chair and sofa bed. Sadly, the sofa bed would not fit through the door, even after we took the door off its hinges and took the legs off the sofa bed. My bad for not measuring the doorway and the sofa bed. I don’t think about such things. I really don’t. I guess I imagined that such things are standard, that no one would create a sofa bed that couldn’t fit through a doorway.
And so we left the sofa bed in the living room, which is making the cats very happy (much softer for their tushes than the black vinyl sofa we’ve owned since my residency). The black sofa is in the bedroom, which is less than ideal since it’s not a sofa BED.
Tonight, I unloaded five boxes of books, which is about 1/3 of what I need to unload. I’ve unloaded my Gaiman and my Burroughs and my Conrad. My Dick is still in the garage. (Philip K Dick, that is.) I unloaded my Shakespeare and my Shaw. My Martin Cruz Smith and my Crumley and my Goodis. Oh, and I discovered that I must have gone through one hell of a Roald Dahl phase, because we own a LOT of Dahl.
And then there are all those math, physics, and chemistry textbooks which will go to waste if Jake decides to become a botanist or a history major. Karen has some pretty heavy duty shit, I’m telling you. Complex analysis, exotic algebras for quantum mechanics. They’re the kind of books that don’t go bad, but I suspect they’re too high level even for our local Cal State library.
Yes, I should donate more of my books. It’s bizarre, really, even a little crazy to want to hang onto books I’ve read but have no intention of reading again, all because I liked them so much the first or second or third time through. I guess there’s no predicting what I might yet decide to re-read, but still . . . it’s nuts. I think I’ll go through the lot of them yet again, next time we move. Whenever that is.
Still to come: we need a little table next to the easy chair, and a reading light to go atop it.
D.
ha we need a library. right now it’s called “shaina’s room” and there are way too many books to fit…oops. goal for the fall: get them all organized by author.
also, if you dont know of it already, librarything.com lets you catalog all your books. it’s great!
Shaina, even after getting rid of at least 1/4 of my books, it would still take me many hours to catalog everything. Hours I could spend reading 🙂
haha yeah it took me an entire summer 🙂