a sky gone on fire (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
askygoneonfire) wrote2011-04-14 10:02 pm
askygoneonfire) wrote2011-04-14 10:02 pm
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The shelves are beginning to bow.
Tomorrow, at 3:30, it is The Holidays. School breaks up for an unfathomably luxurious 2 and a half weeks and I don't intend to go in for a single days work (my contract requires me to work two floating weeks during school holidays, I pick when). In preparation for this vast expanse of time I have been ordering books! Books!
Today the first one arrived (Ray Bradbury's The October Country) and I pressed my nose into its pages to inhale the heady scent of a book as old as me (this copy even being published in the same year as me!) and made my way to my book shelf. Not with any clear design on what I was looking for I started thumbing through books at random. Flicking yellowed pages open and reading snatches of hundred of different stories which all have unique and specific connections to different times and places in my life.
I called to my Mum to read to her from The Wrestling Princess, a staple of my youth being a story about a girl like me - who didn't want to wear dresses or do what the other [girls] Princesses did. In the end she marries a tiny little man who likes extreme sports, and she drives herself to her wedding in her forklift truck. I call that 'the Masterplan'.
I caught myself, in the end, just caressing the books. Running my hands along broken spines and dog eared corners. Softened covers and torn dust covers. The [first of the three volumes of The] Chronicles of Narnia lost its spine many years ago. Frankenstein is held together with good will and possibly the amount of ink which adorns the margins and bottoms of pages. Roald Dahl's are pressed together in a space just a fraction too small for them, Shakespeare and the Romantics luxuriate on a bottom shelf - the higher ones being too prone to bending to hold such weighty tomes. Lee Edelman sits contentiously against Tess Coslett's collaborative Women, Power and Resistance.
Eventually I tore myself away - although not unburdened - carrying an armful of books to deposit on the bedroom floor I scuttled back across the landing. Alas, the bedroom floor is already covered in books, zines and cds so the books are now joyfully strewn across the bed....I anticipate I will simply wriggle between them to sleep and awake coughing up bits of Hardy.
As much as I dread the inevitable destruction of society as we know it and living in a failed-utopia/dystopian nightmare I also can't wait for the day I wander into wasteland outside the government approved settlement to find the 'book people' and be asked "what have you to offer [Montag]?"
* Fahrenheit 451
Today the first one arrived (Ray Bradbury's The October Country) and I pressed my nose into its pages to inhale the heady scent of a book as old as me (this copy even being published in the same year as me!) and made my way to my book shelf. Not with any clear design on what I was looking for I started thumbing through books at random. Flicking yellowed pages open and reading snatches of hundred of different stories which all have unique and specific connections to different times and places in my life.
I called to my Mum to read to her from The Wrestling Princess, a staple of my youth being a story about a girl like me - who didn't want to wear dresses or do what the other [girls] Princesses did. In the end she marries a tiny little man who likes extreme sports, and she drives herself to her wedding in her forklift truck. I call that 'the Masterplan'.
I caught myself, in the end, just caressing the books. Running my hands along broken spines and dog eared corners. Softened covers and torn dust covers. The [first of the three volumes of The] Chronicles of Narnia lost its spine many years ago. Frankenstein is held together with good will and possibly the amount of ink which adorns the margins and bottoms of pages. Roald Dahl's are pressed together in a space just a fraction too small for them, Shakespeare and the Romantics luxuriate on a bottom shelf - the higher ones being too prone to bending to hold such weighty tomes. Lee Edelman sits contentiously against Tess Coslett's collaborative Women, Power and Resistance.
Eventually I tore myself away - although not unburdened - carrying an armful of books to deposit on the bedroom floor I scuttled back across the landing. Alas, the bedroom floor is already covered in books, zines and cds so the books are now joyfully strewn across the bed....I anticipate I will simply wriggle between them to sleep and awake coughing up bits of Hardy.
As much as I dread the inevitable destruction of society as we know it and living in a failed-utopia/dystopian nightmare I also can't wait for the day I wander into wasteland outside the government approved settlement to find the 'book people' and be asked "what have you to offer [Montag]?"
* Fahrenheit 451