Book Distress

I still haven’t finished rearranging my bookshelf in alphabetical order, my living room is a mess of books and I keep coming up with new schemes of organising. Its actually a disaster. My spelling has gone down the drain. Where the hell do you put a name like Ursula K. Le Guin. I severely overestimated how many B authors I own. I am grateful to the Y authors for taking up little space . I don’t know why I have Marguerite Duras in the flat. Someone must have spat her out at a party without asking for a Kleenex. I’ve decided, though I don’t have the space here, one should, rather mean-spiritedly, have a master and minor writers shelf (according to ones own opinions of what makes either) I keep getting annoyed having to put some writer I don’t love next to Ann Quinn or Henry James or Nabokov, and the masters I will refer to again and again, the minors no.

All these books are from the last six and a half years, from when I moved to the UK and almost about the same time I have been involved in the literary world, so there are the kind of books I never had on my shelf in Canada: proofs or books by people I know, books i’ve written myself (most of these copies I hide under the bed or chuck in the recycling as publishers send you too many ). Sorting out these, I missed and really want to be around my pre-author life books, the ones I read in college, the ‘complete works of Oscar Wilde’ which is intensely precious when you are 19, the Philip Larkin poems I drew cartoons of Philip Larkin in, the ‘books that made you’ books as the ‘professional books’ look empty and soulless somehow without with those forebears. My mind gets stuck and fixated in bizarre ways and I wondered for hours the whereabouts of a book I once had on 18th century fireworks and if I had left it in Montreal when I graduated from university well over a decade ago. One version of paradise is a great hall full of everything you’ve ever owned, all neatly stacked and organised to potter around and examine.

Every year in Edinburgh there is a big Christian aid book sale at the New Town Church on George st. A friend texted to tell me they were going with a few others at 9am on opening day. When they got there they realised it didn’t open till 10, but no matter, there was already a massive queue, old men clutching crumpled empty Waitrose bags. I saw a woman scream at someone for skipping the queue, luckily not me- I joined my friends near the front which was sneaky but it wasn’t coveted croissants or concert tickets so I had no shame. It was chaos once the doors opened. Elderly people with sharp elbows. There was a tension in the air, like something almost sexual, lots of beady eyes and greasy tweed, the types you see at high church services and midweek swims at the Victorian baths with their old parchment toenails but now in a fervid and aggressive mood. I thought I was bound to find some good books, even the sermons of Henry King I wanted, but all I saw were copies of Lorna Doone, the books typical of an early 20th century boarding school boy( latin grammar and Billy Bunter type novels) and common charity shop fare: mainstream biographies of tony blair and churchill, some of those cream coloured Wordsworth editions, old crappy translations of Russian novels, 90s computer manuals, recent Scottish crime novels. What was everyone going crazy for? It felt like this was the last room of books in the world. I almost bought a copy of Antonia Fraser’s biography of Charles II then thought I could just get it at the library in less chaotic circumstances and three pounds seemed a little pricey for a secondhand paperback . A friend who knits found some very good and rare knitting books, including a 90s one on knitting historical British figures, perhaps the niche sections (cricket, railways,crochet) were the only worthwhile parts. The Christian and Literary sections certainly weren’t. I went to stand outside, with the old puzzles and popular fiction paperbacks. A friend pointed to a saccharine looking book and said that author is a landlord of a friend of ours and is kicking them out. its open next weekend too maybe there were be new boxes but not sure I can face it.

I am reading the The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley because I wanted something summery and English and i’ve read lady Chatterley and Brideshead Revisited dozens of times, the last rereads just weeks ago. I don’t understand why I write the way I do when the novels I most like to read are basically about posh people swimming naked. I don’t like when authors go by initials, I find it tacky, I would much rather read a book by a Leslie Poles than L.P. I hate author initialing as much as I do contemporary authors referring to characters just as ‘L’ or ‘M’ or ‘W’.

names are hard so I keep a character name notebook when I come across a name I like I put it there . I highly recommend doing this. If I change a characters name a lot when working on something, that is a bad sign, like chasing an insect with a pin. I recycle names across books too. Anyway, 'I often see Eustace and Hilda by Hartley in charity shops, and as I like the names, I open it, but I find it basically unreadable. It didn’t click that it was the same author as the Go-Between until I looked him up. Eustace and Hilda was written years before the go-between a nice sign one can improve.

Like in The Go-Between the weather in Edinburgh has been unnaturally dry and hot. Ludwig has been sunbathing under the watchful eyes of neighbouring cats. I have finished a novella I am very proud of which is not the one i’ve been working on the last few years but came out of me suddenly.one should be a cad when it comes to writing projects.