shelf love, e to g
by uzwi
TS Eliot
Richard Ellman
Tim Etchells
AA Evans
Michel Faber
Theodora Fitzgibbon
Peter Fleming
Nick Flynn
Richard Ford
Thomas Frank
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Safran Foer
Alan Furst
Peter Gay
Gerard Genette
Ellen Gilchrist
James Gleick
William Golding
The Brothers Goncourt
Edward Gorey
Robert Graves
John Gray
Brian Greene
John Gribbin
Che Guevara
Pedro Juan Guitierrez
I take down one of these books, find a bookmark 32 years old, this torn browned bit of paper with “tabolites stored in fat” scribbled on it in a handwriting not mine, which I take to have read “metabolites”. After that, well, the voices start, “Buy the Pontiac”, “Avoid that shadow in the wall”, usual thing. So I douse the joint in gasoline & stand across the street drinking barrel proof bourbon & watching the flames etc etc. You try to break up with your library but it just follows you about whining til you hit it with a stick.
Ay no Faulkner? The way you approach the Viriconium stories reminds me of Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County. I always thought of Faulkner as a weird tale author . I have just started reading your stories and was moved to the point of sharing your work with my students . I look forward to your future releases.
I once gave away all my paperback science fiction (to a homeless man who sold books on the street), thinking that I had read them and wouldn’t again.
I found myself some years later replacing almost all, book by book so I could read them all again. So even if you get rid of your library and find it a new mate you have to pay through the nose to get it back.
Hmm, I can see that the Gutenbergpolizei will be round one of these days…
In the (library) trade though its called relegation, so you could also imaginatively put two teams of 11 books each, with some on the bench, up against each other, and see what happens: I mean, it’s the only legitimate use of footie that I can see.
“You try to break up with your library but it just follows you about whining til you hit it with a stick”.
Sounds like many of my breakups, aside from the dousing in gasoline bit.
>>So even if you get rid of your library and find it a new mate you have to pay through the nose to get it back.
There are so many books that you will see in charity shops for years to come. So it’s not worth owning everything. You can think of charity shops as an open-ended bookcase where you can free up some change from a tenner when you need to. Apart from Oxfam, of course. Those fuckers know what everything is worth.
The more you move flat the less sentimental you get about the physicality of books.
I like Mike M’s suggestion. No doubt everyone will be trying to get Camus onto their team. An existentialist eleven. Sartre on the left wing. A reluctant Nietzsche pushed out onto the right wing.
I’ve got Che Guevara getting confused by a Tim Etchells’ show and the Forced Ent crew spurring the revolution forward in Congo where Che met late Kabila Senior and foresaw what a fat grotesque womaniser he was long before anyone else. Anyways, so Tim’s pinching Che’s bottom and giggling but Che thought it was TS Eliot and shoots him, so AA Evans comes to the rescue but it’s too late because Kabila Sr has come back to life and is assaulting his son half way down the book shelf for taking over power. Cool.
p.s. Next time, can we have some wimmin in the line up please MJH?
Well I can’t, strictly, choose to mention those who are not on the shelves, or it wouldn’t be the shelf game, it would be a list of approved writers. But they do turn up, Lara, although I discover to my shame that they are mostly Dead European White Females.