(no subject)

[proximoception]

When the house gets this messy I now and then think about getting rid of some books. And then I think about getting rid of thousands of books. And then of all of them but one shelf, and I think about what might be on it, and I make some lists, and open up a few books and read until I sleep and don't clean anything.

Let's say twenty-five:

Old Pelican Shakespeare, Signet Shelley, Penguin Faerie Queene, Vintage Remembrance of Things Past v.1, ---. v.2, ---. v.3, Oxford Ibsen volume 3 (Brand/Peer Gynt), Old Penguin War & Peace, Old Penguin Anna Karenina, Old Penguin Childhood/Boyhood/Youth, Tolstoy's Short Fiction v.1, ---. v.2, Goethe Library v.1: Poems, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Dickinson's Complete Poems, Moby-Dick, Melville's Complete Short Fiction, Labyrinths, Kafka's Complete Stories & Parables, Signet Hazlitt, The Visionary Company, Bantam pocket Little Big, The Palm at the End of the Mind, Frost's Collected Poems, The Oxford Anth. of Eng. Lit. v.2 (1800 on)

Fuck that, let's say fifty, two shelves:

Bishop's Collected Poems, the Oxford early Browning hardback, The Ring and the Book, Emerson's Library of America College Edition, Engine Summer, The Magic Mountain, Invisible Cities, Other Inquisitions, Robinson's Collected Poems, Women in Love, Lawrence's Short Stories, Sabbath's Theater, Zuckerman Bound, Operation Shylock, My Life as a Man, Autobiography of Red, Glass Irony & God, Housman's Collected Poems, The Woman in the Dunes, Middlemarch, The Border Trilogy, Faust (which?), The Solitudes, The Red and the Black, To the Lighthouse

And if I had twenty-five more, say along the top of the shorter Ikea shelf:

Blood Meridian, Suttree, Love & Sleep, Daemonomania, Endless Things, Orlando, The Waves, Melville's Poems, Owen's Poems, Edward Thomas' Poems, Ammons' Selected Poems, Oxford Ibsen v.4 (Emperor & Galilean), Oxford Ibsen v.8 (Last plays), Lang's The Pre-Raphaelites & Their Circle (esp. for Swinburne), Lotte in Weimar, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom's Yeats, Yeats' Complete Poems partly for the sake of the former, a Peacock volume with both Nightmare Abbey and Gryll Grange in it, Light in August, Victory, The Beauty of the Husband, Charterhouse of Parma, Sentimental Education, Whitman's Library of America College Edition

Didn't have to clean a thing.

But 75 is unround:

Milton's Poems, Blake's Complete Works, Hawthorne's Short Stories, Hawthorne's Novels, West's Novels, Sentimental Education, Three by Flannery O'Connor, The Road, Norton Anthology of English Literature 6.1, ---. 6.2, Goethe Library v.5 (or whichever has Elective Affinities), From Sappho to Valery, Hemingway's First 49 Stories, Ulysses, James Joyce Reader, Sketches from a Hunter's Album, Plato's Dialogues, The Cossacks (should be at least in the top 50, later lists will amend this), Thurber's Library of America volume

...need six more:

Homer and Dante whatever my misgivings, Finnegans Wake to fail to read, the Bible for reference, the Metamorphoses for that and admiration, and of course Resurrection

Comments

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

And nearby on the floor:

Kafka's Diaries, Byron's Oxford Authors volume, The Brothers Karamazov, Borges' Selected Non-Fictions, If on a winter's night a traveler, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Longman Shelley v.2 for Laon & Cythna, an anthology of English comedies, a complete Wilde, a complete Carroll, Wordsworth's Oxford Authors volume (should be in the top 25 actually), The Anxiety of Influence, Don Quixote because how could so many people be wrong, Sanctuary, a volume of Chekhov etc.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

that's two copies of sentimental education if you need to free up floor space

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm sentimental that way. And a slow learner.