Today is a bank holiday (foreigners this means a day OFF work) so naturally I am wide the fuck awake at the ass crack of dawn and completely unable to sit still.
I found one of those 1001 books you should read before you die lists (45 so far), and now I’ve decided that today I’m going to play librarian.
I can never remember all the books I’ve read. It’s hard when you see a title you DEFINITELY remember from high school/uni and you think ‘Oh yeah I had to read that for Mr. Patterson’s class in 11th grade!’ Then you think ‘Did I read that or did I watch the movie version while making out with Doug Seng and then everyone in our year got mono as a result?’
Normally it’s the later.
So now I’m sat in front of my bookcase (we’ll get to this specialness later) and I’ve logged onto one of those book reading sites – goodreads – to upload the previously read contents of my bookcase (and what I can remember from the bookcase back home) so that rather than focusing on the fact that I haven’t read 956 of those 1001 books I can focus on what I have achieved reading wise. You can find my list on goodreads.com if you search for Emily Pulham. I’m the Statue of Liberty.
And here’s my current top ten (okay, twelve):
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Women by TC Boyle
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Every Man Dies Alone – Hans Fallada
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Steig Larsson
Atonement by Ian McEwan
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
Now this bookcase is probably my favourite thing in my flat (besides my goldfish, obvs.) The fiction section is catagorised according to colour. Here’s how it looked in January.
There were a few bits that bothered me and the other OCD sufferers that I know – including that the books weren’t organized by height (how did I not consider that as an option!) and also that the green books were broken up over two shelves.
I love solving problems, so I read four more inches of yellow books (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – ACE – A Pale View of Hills – WEIRD – The Tiger’s Wife – REALLY REALLY WEIRD – A Thousand Splendid Suns – WONDERFUL) and re catagorised.
Here’s the results:
Hit a couple problems with blue – so many different types of blue – to organise by size or by shade? These are the hard decisions in life.
So now I need to add to it – what’s missing from the fiction library? What should I read next?
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