DID I NEED MORE BOOKS?

A rhetorical question. No, of course not. I have plenty, including quite a few I haven’t started yet. But I went to the legendary (in Castlemaine they are!) Friends of Castlemaine Library book sale. Not only went to it – I am on the committee so I was there the afternoon before to set up and to assist with sales on the big day.
So I got to inspect thousands of books before the hordes of frenzied bibliophile locals even set eyes on them.
And almost against my will ended up taking a few home with me. Even after I’d done a big cull and donated around 50 unwanted books to the sale…

Did I need more books? Emphatically, no. But I am weak-willed. And they were cheap! Only $1 for fiction, $2 for non-fiction and a few special volumes a bit dearer.
Plus, I got to choose some for free as a gift for volunteering. Surely this makes it OK.

I had proper reasons for my choices, too.

I’d watched the SBS documentary on the Cambridge spies only a few days earlier, so A Spy Among Friends leapt out at me. I have had (past tense, hopefully) some long and intense bouts of insomnia, and the topic interests me. English writer Diana Athill (1917-2019) had a long and distinguished career in publishing – she worked with Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul among others – before she became an award-winning writer herself, with a series of memoirs. This is the last, so perhaps not the best place to start, but I never mind  knowing the end of a story. It will be a good introduction. And I remember meaning to read The Life of I when it first came out, and never did.

I’ve already skimmed through the book on novel writing. It is, as Lynne Truss says on the cover, extremely funny. Laugh-out-loud and tears-running-down-my-face funny. The authors parody bad prose with excruciating accuracy. I’ve read most of Penelope Lively’s novels for adults and children; I admire her writing and look forward to this memoir. Storr’s Solitude is something I re-read every few years, yet I’ve never read anything else by him. And now I can. And Out of the Woods is nature, walking and thinking. Right up my alley.

Oh, and so are the 35 copies of a beautifully produced English magazine called Hortus, which should keep me in armchair gardening all winter. Aren’t the covers lovely? Worth the 20c per copy they cost me.
This catalogue of utter gorgeousness was $4! How could I resist?

This is why I have book culls. Because I really do need more books.