Acquisitons, recent and foreseeable.

New Book Order

• Elizabeth Costello, J. M. Coetzee. My favourite Coetzee book; one day I just felt the need to get it onto my shelves, so there it is.
• Tinkers, Paul Harding. Recent Pulitzer Prize winner; I have no idea what it is about.
• Collected Poems, Philip Larkin. Hello, Mr. Larkin! Always good to see you.
• The Ruined Map, Kōbō Abe. Probably less well-known around these parts; here is a tasty article about him. [via The Millions]

Textbooks I Need

So according to the reading list of my two subjects, here are the texts that I need:

• Crick Crack Monkey, Merle Hodge.
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. As you will know I have never read this before; people always talk about it, and I’m quietly hopeful that it’ll be as good as Never Let Me Go, if not better; I was somehow quite disappointed with Nocturnes.
• In the Castle of My Skin, George Lamming.
• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie.
• Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee. I have this; my first reading of this was a library copy so this is brand new; it was on my waiting list; it is one of the few books that I won’t have to buy.
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. I have this too, and it is in fact one of the oldest books on my shelves; it is somewhat out of shape and very yellow, but that only adds to its charm; one of the books of my youth and therefore a personal favourite, but I’m not too sure about how it will fare with all of these years that have passed.
• Texts for nothing, Samuel Beckett. I suppose this means Stories and Texts for Nothing, though it could also mean that without the three stories.
• Contempt, Alberto Moravia.
• Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss. Ah yes, otherwise known as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
• A Woman Alone, etc., Rame and Fo. Hmm, I guess I’ll have to ask about the et cetera bit.
• A Heart So White, Javier Marías. I was actually planning to get started on Marías because I’ve read more than a few recommendations for Your Face Tomorrow; I had not quite anticipated that school would give me a helping hand of some sort.
• Crabwalk, Gűnter Grass.
• Selected poems by Zbigniew Herbert. I’ve only read one of his poems, so this is pretty much a great opportunity.

Meanwhile, Movies

Oh yes, we’re doing a few movies too:

• Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola. This is the only film I’ve watched on this list.
• Ararat, Atom Egoyan.
• Ulysses’ Gaze, Theo Angelopoulos.

Time, Mr. Freeman?

That’s actually more to cover than I thought, so I don’t know where my normal day-to-day reading will fit in, but I hope I manage to make time. Here are some of the immediate highlights from my waiting list:

• The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), Macedonio Fernández. I’ve been waiting a long time to read this.
• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.
• Rimbaud Complete, Arthur Rimbaud. Hello, Mr. Rimbaud! Always good to see you, too.
• The Implacable Order of Things, José Luís Peixoto.

And of course, a bunch of other things.

“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t contemplate them… but these are extraordinary times.”

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Shelf Life

Yesterday, a couple of pieces of furniture arrived, including a new bookshelf, so I took the chance to rearrange all of my books. I also had to pack up some of the old stuff on the old rack, action figures and the like, so it took a while before everything got settled. Here are some photos in case you ever wondered what my shelf looks like.

Here’s a picture of the old rack where I displayed some things. I had to clear this out because there isn’t space for it anymore.

These are some of the things I displayed. They’re going to some dark corner, or some happy buyer.

Here are the empty shelves. The new one is on the right.

I wanted to sort out all of my books properly, so I took them all out. Here you see all of them on the floor, about 250 of them and 30 waiting to join them. You’ll also notice a jar under my bed. That’s my pencil jar. Beside the jar are an assortment of little things, mostly keepsakes and mementos, because I’m too sentimental for my own good. These sit in the free spaces of my bookshelves.

Photography books went in here. The space here is slightly longer. We chose this new piece of furniture deliberately because it’ll accommodate the larger photography books.

Here are the books all sorted out. On the left shelf, you’ll find most of the fiction. Of interest, there’s a music section in the lower part of the shelf. The right shelf comprises mostly of graphic novels. There’s a section for academic writing and other forms of non-fiction. There’s also a children’s section right at the top. It all looks rather empty now, but I’m sure it won’t be long before it fills up.

There’s some stuff left to do before I can consider the packing done. One of those things is hanging up these lumadessa prints, which I received for my birthday all those months ago.

Looking ahead, I’ll want to fill up that top space so that the jar isn’t so lonely. I’m also trying to think up a nice way to make platforms such that more books can go in. The problem with that is that the books are all of different sizes so I can’t just put planks in or the like.

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Unscheduled Downtime

So here is a post where I’m actually very sleepy. It wasn’t supposed to show up now, but there were some technical problems that I believe the Web Walrus has fixed. I mean, who else could have done such miraculous work? We were actually back up about 24 hours ago, I think, but I was out the whole day and didn’t get back to it until, well, now.

I’m very tired now. It is a good time to sleep. Particularly because I need to get up early tomorrow despite it being a public holiday. Of course, every time I say something like this, it means I probably won’t be sleeping any time soon.

Today was a particularly hot day. That is, even for our sunny country. I guess I picked the wrong day to have a rest. While I was doing my laces before leaving the house, I’d already begun to sweat. And of all things, I had to spend the whole day outside, walking in the open quite a bit too.

This looks like a busy weekend, and I’m not sure how much work I’m going to get done, but I’d expected weeks like this. It’s why I don’t feel particularly good about myself whenever I seem to be cutting into bonus territory. Typically it ends up being a sort of buffer for days like these.

The book club is… hmm, it’s probably too early to tell. I have cause for optimism and also cause for pessimism. I think we’ll see in a week or two.

I’m not particularly tired now, but judging by the structure of this post, my brain is already working out of order. Just let me ramble for a tiny bit more.

It was nice to see all of those friends today. Sure beats the typical stay-at-your-desk day, but it can’t happen every day. Partly because I need to work. Partly because they need to work. And partly because we would really get sick of one another.

I want to drop by at IKEA and get one of those glass oh wait I think I’ve mentioned this before.

Results are coming out on Monday. Exciting times, these. I don’t really know what to expect, particularly because NUS results days are like a whole season of 24.

Finally, I want to say that I just finished Flowers For Algernon, one of my first loves, for the second time. I think I look at it very differently now, though. I also bought a book for two dollars yesterday. It’s a second-hand (third? fourth? fifth?) copy of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness.

Okay, I’m done for the night.

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Mondays, mondays.

Oh, look, it’s Monday. What a surprise.

This week, I’m going back to camp for some physical training before my IPPT. That’s a ways away, so this thing will last a few weeks.

Apart from that, I’m also gunning for a giant milestone with respect to my current project. I think I might hit it by tomorrow or Wednesday. I can’t really tell. I’m unpredictable in that sort of way, even as I try to assert a degree of routine into my work. The thing that remains predictable, however, is that I’m a relatively slow worker.

My book club is supposed to get started next week, so this week will likely be used to make preparations of some sort. Saying that is comforting because it makes me feel like there is something to prepare for. The truth is, I don’t actually know. We’re doing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (did I say that already?) and taking it all very slow. I hope it’s a nice book, and I hope we talk about interesting things. Most of all, I hope it’ll be fun.

I think new furniture is supposed to arrive this week or the next. My bookshelf is one of the pieces, and it looks like we’ll be sorting the whole library all over again. I’m considering sorting books by different categories, and by first names instead of last (a practice that I have in place now), and we’re also thinking about ways to expand the storage capacity since we don’t have all that much room and the number of books is only going to get larger.

I should drop by at IKEA one of these days and get those lovely glass things that look like candy containers. Do you call them bottles? flasks? I was all rather sure that there was a specialised name for them; I’m not so sure anymore. I want to use those for my pencils.

I’m looking for nice art. Maybe some natural history would be nice. I’m putting it on one of the walls. Whichever wall remains. Any suggestions? I’m trying to make it a bit compatible with my lumadessa prints and the rest of my furniture.

Right, onto work.

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Work works.

Work, Work, Work

I’m now approximately two thirds of the way into the first draft by estimation. Well, actually, I’m more like four sevenths of the way into it. This is about the time where I start to wonder whether all of this actually works. You see, if it doesn’t work, then this will all have been a very bad idea and I probably shouldn’t have started on it. If it works, then… well, great. I’ve not grown a lot better at identifying these things, unfortunately.

I will more or less only know by the end of it. That’s just the way I am. It is partly due to how I basically don’t have very clear ideas about where I’m headed about 80% of the way. It just evolves as I go along, and things can change fairly drastically before I’m done with it. So there’s no real way for me to get a feel for whether or not it’s going to be a success until it’s all done and sitting in front of me.

Meanwhile, the best thing I can do is just not to worry and to try to get it done, making it as good as I can in the process. Worrying really just incapacitates you and gets you nowhere. I’m already a slow writer to begin with, so I don’t really need anything debilitating.

Books Arrived

All of my books have arrived rather safely and they make me very happy. Slight damage here and there but that’s okay. A few of them have really surprised me because they’re prettier than I thought they’d be. I’ll get to wrapping them soon enough. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow night. Just as soon as I pull myself away from work.

Movies, Orwell

I’ve been watching old videos and new, revisiting film favourites and trying to unearth new ones. I try to do that on a regular basis though I can’t say I’ve been very diligent. I’ve also tried to be diligent with my volume of Orwell’s essays. I’m going at about a couple a day, though that seems to mean that I might end up taking a very long time. Oh well, patience, as they always tried to tell me, is something of a virtue. I sure hope it is.

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And now I know the secret history of British plants.

A day after receiving my Everyman’s edition of To The Lighthouse in the mail, I open my mailbox to see a big package wrapped in cardboard. Excitedly, I fish it out of the little metal space and hop my way back home, careful not to let the rain get on the package. I had dinner first, so I tried my best to contain my excitement. When the clock struck nine, I got my fat fingers on the package and pulled and tugged and huffed and puffed until the cardboard came off.

Initially, I thought there would be two books inside, because it was just so big. But no, there was only one and it was Hatfield’s Herbal in a nice hardbound edition. Because I’d seen the more recent paperback before, I didn’t think that the hardback would be this big, but that’s certainly fine with me.

It’s a really nice looking book and I haven’t felt so happy about the simple fact of getting a really pretty book since… Heck, I really don’t remember. It’s probably a sad reflection on how I’ve not got a purely pretty book in a long, long time. Oh well, this more than makes up for it.

It smells wonderful. The pages are lovely to touch. And all this for just fifteen dollars. Thank you, Book Depository; thank you, Penguin; and thank you, Ms. Hatfield.

On a slightly different note, still five books to come, though I kind of doubt any of them will be as pretty. They are all standard paperbacks that is the norm for giamsiap students such as yours truly. Besides, paperback editions really help save on the shelf space, or so I would want to believe.

I think I’ll have to build a couple of platforms into my shelves so that I can put a few more books in. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. The new one will be coming in a week or two, but if nothing else, it serves as a very decent reminder that I don’t have as much space as I would like to have…

Meanwhile, I’m going to add my new book to my growing waiting list…

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Slow Man

Go Slowly

I’m beginning to realise that with my fairly tremendous list of things to do, I might have to step on the gas. This happens every time it’s the holidays. They aren’t actually big things involving a lot of investment, but you just don’t really know how to prioritise them. I’m getting it together slowly, I guess, but I better be full steam ahead soon if I hope to have any chance of clearing the holiday list.

Books

Books are one of those things. I have an idea of what to read, but then I do some writing, then I move a wardrobe, and then I watch a movie I had planned to watch, and it’s time for bed. It’s somewhat difficult to think that it’s the little things that are keeping me busy, but that’s the way it goes. I really do hope to finish at least a couple of novels and one large book by the end of the holidays. At least.

(Large books are those that are so gigantic I feel reluctant to start on them. They also tend to be the ones that are so huge that I don’t want to take them with me out of the house, when I do most of my reading.)

Wardrobe

So my dad shifted my gigantic wardrobe thing to my room with a bit of help from me. Though to be a bit more honest, it felt like a full day’s work. I’m just glad that we’ve shifted it over finally and won’t probably have to worry about doing that again. It involved a lot of tilting, dismantling, emptying, and pushing. (It’s basically too large to be moved about and too tall to fit readily under the doorways.)

And after that, I did a standard day’s worth of writing.

Book Club

Book clubs are just one of those things that sound easy and should probably be easy, but end up being altogether more tricky than most than you can foresee. I’m taking it a bit at a time, and starting with an experiment to figure out what actually needs to be taken care of and what doesn’t work. God bless the people who will be participating, especially if it doesn’t work out. (Significant chance of failure.)

I’m trying my best to figure out what has to be done and in what order. That’s less obvious that I thought it’d be. I’ve been looking at a couple of online book clubs hoping to figure out a few things, but it doesn’t get too much easier. Well, I don’t think I’ll wait much longer, and I’ll just dive in and hope for the best.

After I take a deep breath.

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Recent Acquisitions

Apart from some music, I ordered a few books on Monday as well. Here’s the list in no particular order other than the one I remember them in:

1. The Elegance Of The Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
2. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
3. Hatfield’s Herbal, Gabrielle Hatfield
4. Five Modern No Plays, Yukio Mishima
5. Little, Big, John Crowley
6. Rimbaud Complete, Arthur Rimbaud
7. The Museum Of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), Macedonio Fernandez

I can’t believe Rimbaud has not been sitting on my shelf all of this time. Same goes for To The Lighthouse. And I’m quite surprised that it took me so long to get to Little, Big.

I had to stop there because I am a poor kid.

I also have to make a donation soon. Which reminds me to post this link up here: http://www.wolfire.com/humble. Donate in the name of gaming!

Besides, World of Goo is awesome. Or so they tell me. It’s great to be charitable and to get a game I’ve wanted for a bit of time now simultaneously.

So, spread the word!

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Exam Survival Kit

Music

1. Narrow Stairs, Death Cab For Cutie
2. Good Evening New York City, Paul McCartney
3. 桑田さんのお仕事 07/08 ～魅惑のAVマリアージュ～ The Works Of Mr. K. Kuwata 07/08, 桑田佳祐 Keisuke Kuwata
4. The Velvet Underground And Nico, The Velvet Underground and Nico
5. All The Plans, Starsailor

Most of the time, music just keeps me awake so I don’t fall asleep halfway through my revision, but let me just say that I know the songs of 2 and 3 so well that it is often tempting to sing along.

Games

Well, I have to entertain myself every now and then. I was in the process of completing a Mass Effect 2 game, but I think I’ll suspend that. I started a new Metal Gear Solid 4 game yesterday under the influence of my friend who just got a PS3. (Congrats!)

I just have to play. Even for an hour a day or so. I would feel very unbalanced if I didn’t, and that definitely isn’t what I want going into the exams.

Idle Thinking

Any moment I can spare on “hobbies” is spent on thinking about how to implement my forthcoming book club experiment. I’m supposed to get that running in the holidays, and if it succeeds, that will bode well for the prospects of an actual book club in the future. Here’s hoping.

Rewards

To have something to look forward to after my exams, I’m going to buy a few books at the end of this. I might buy a couple of other things too. Call it retail therapy.

Specific to books, however, I’ve been going through my list, adding and subtracting, trying to work out a nice list to go all guns a-blazing on by the time I’m done with these pesky exams.

Miscellany

I’ve been trying to sleep earlier because it’s an early paper tomorrow and I need to get used to sleeping early. I hope it works. Most of my papers are in the afternoon, so it probably won’t be too bad, but let’s just hope tomorrow works out fine.

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Nearly Finished

Over?

I think it’s all over. I’m not sure yet, and there are admittedly a few other leftover homework things I have to do, but I think the main course is over for this semester. I kind of suspect that there will be a test next week, but that will only be revealed on Friday. Otherwise, there is a certain sense of completion that I don’t really like. Makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable to realise how much time has passed.

Tests

Wow, my tests look good. My tests results, that is. That hasn’t happened since primary school. I’m sure this is all just to cushion the blow of potentially horrible exam results. Speaking of which, the exams are kind of scary. I get nervous rather easily these days. I think it’s associated with the things I’ve been doing. My brain just goes a bit crazy and it takes a bit to steady myself. The funny part is, it tends to be with things that I’ve not usually been nervous about. I think it’ll go away after a while.

Trickle

Writing has been slowing down. Despite having a fairly good idea of where to go, I’ve not quite been able to find the spirit to put it down onto paper. I still do my target word counts, but my expectations have decreased somewhat and I’m happy to get these little portions out every day. I’ll keep working at it. I’m sure it will pick up sooner or later. Besides, it’s nearly exam time, so I guess this is somewhat fortuitous timing.

Tournament

Wolf Hall wins this year’s  Tournament of Books. [via The Morning News] It’s just about winning everything, isn’t it? The Uncharted 2 of books. I haven’t read it. Doesn’t seem like my kind of book. Then again, I said that about The Savage Detectives too.

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