A recent BTT question had to do with the books we all have sitting around on our shelves, unread. Many of these books are probably not new arrivals in the TBR pile, but have been on those shelves for months or years, perhaps through moves or reorganizations. Chances are some of them will never be [...]
Posts under ‘Bibliophilia’
Deadly Sins of Bookdoom
So does this fall under coveting, or just plain lust?
On “Sequels”
A catalogue got sent to me this week by a purveyor of books, and having a few leisurely moments this morning, I flipped through it to see what I could see. Here is what I saw: no less than 15 Jane Austen “sequels” on offer. What on earth? Who is writing these things? Who is [...]
More Delicious Used Books
I had a meeting downtown yesterday morning, and on the way back to the subway I just so happened to pass by my favourite ever bookstore. And since I had ten dollars in my purse, and am a huge sucker for used books, I decided to stop and see what I could get. Here’s the [...]
Banks Rattle Me
One of my favourite Stephen Leacock stories, “My Financial Career,” starts this way: When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me. The moment I cross the threshold of a bank and attempt to transact business there, [...]
Missed Connection
Dear Dancer, Have you finished The Silmarillion? It’s been a week or two and so maybe you have. I saw you again on the subway and now I want to know. Did you like it? I saw you the first time on the bus home one night, I think after my night class, so probably [...]
Bookstore Outing
My summer course started on Monday, which necessitated a trip to the bookstore yesterday to pick up my new textbooks. We have two: The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (7th ed.), edited by Richard Bausch, and Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, by Jane P. Tompkins. I went to the university bookstore and so was [...]
Tell Me
I’ve been thinking lately about why we read. You see, P is basically a non-reader, and so I sometimes find myself trying to explain why, exactly, books and words and such mean so much to me. How many different reasons do you think there are for people picking up books? Why do we read? Why [...]