The whole of my family is sports mad. I realised this some years ago, when at a family get together, and during the eternal recurring conversation of training schedules, recurring injuries (they’ve all got one), my fairy godmother asked quite innocently “but what do you do with a bench press” and a table full of people made the appropriate gesture (no, not the finger, they actually all and in perfect unison mimed being on a bench press). Of course I do understand that some exercise is necessary in order to prevent bingo wings and as I have recurring nightmares about these, I fling my weights about whenever the triceps are looking a bit flobby, but I treat this activity the same way I treat doing my bikini line – quite painful and not something that you mention in public.

Of course, because I’m human, a member of this (over) extended family and at least as competitive as they are I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I have a deep desire to, just once, run the Blaydon race (they all do the Blaydon race) and beat everyone. Just to rub their noses in it. This is not an idle boast. I couldn’t sprint to save my life (well probably I could to save my life) but I’ve got the right body for longer distances, long legs, good lungs and will power that I inherited from the Russian “I-will-burn-my-crops-slaughter-the-livestock-poison-the-well-shoot-my-family-
because-if-I’m-going-down-then-I’m-taking-all-you-fuckers-with-me-as-well-before-I-bite-it”, side of the family. Just tell me that something is impossible and I’ll move heaven and earth to prove you wrong. Unfortunately mum’s absolutely vetoed this dream because she thinks that it would be taking the piss to run it in pink stilettos’ while chain-smoking a packet of Marlboros (that was the major part of the desire). I did point out that I’d be going so fast that no-one would suffer any effects of passive smoking but she remained adamant – spoilsport.

So instead I shop. This is not the soft option. You need speed, focus, a strong right hook, a sharp elbow and nerves of steel. Anyone who’s braved a shoe sale will agree with me on this one. I’m not choosy about where I shop, I’m as happy in Oxfam as I am in Harvey Nicks (happier actually because the shop assistants are so much nicer and lets face it most of the stuff, unless you’re going for the haute couture designers, looks like the sort of bri-nylon you’d find in a charity shop anyway and I refuse to pay a grand for something that looks retro when you can spend £20 on something that’s really retro and do your good deed for the day). It doesn’t even have to be stuff to wear. I’ll shop for anything, food, music stuff (much to F’s eternal delight I’m happy to spend hours in guitar shops), computer stuff, garden stuff, tools (I love buying tools – even though I know rationally that any job in the house be it maintenance or artistic can be accomplished using a bread knife, a roll of gaffer tape, a tape measure with the end missing, a really big hammer and an unlimited supply of expletives), household stuff. You name it – I’ll buy it.

At this point I should add that I’m not one of these people who racks up huge credit card bills in order to satisfy their retail addiction. For a start, I don’t have a credit card (well I do but I rarely use it and if I do I pay it off in full) because I’ve always been of the opinion that if – for example- one morning you woke up and decided that you’d had quite enough of your job then your monthly outgoings should be of the absolute minimum necessary to sustain your roof, your food and your utilities. Second and most importantly, I never but never pay full price for anything. Most clothes – once you have one good suit, two good pairs of shoes, a pair of jeans and a floaty skirt – are extraneous and so there’s no point.
So I sale shop and I eBay. I ebay a lot. I started eBaying because I collect vintage costume jewellery. I have done ever since I was eight years old (first purchase a Whitby jet necklace bought in Diss market for the princely sum of £6.) I tend to buy from the States because not only was that where the major designers were, the exchange rate makes it cheaper and the sellers offer a better service but because Edinburgh calls anything over 3 years old, antique and prices it accordingly.

Obviously from the jewellery it was but a short hop to the clothes and make-up - I’m a sucker for Guerlain makeup – I know that the product is the same as something a third of the price but really the thrill of the decadence of a mascara that’s not only packaged in a beaten gold tube but smells of violets too more than makes up for the extra price.

Now of course I have so many clothes that I tend to treat them as lending library and for all but the most fabulous of pieces that I will keep and wear until they fall apart, I wear things couple of times and sell them on so what could be a dangerous habit practically pays for itself.

But recently I’ve been getting bored with eBay. Not with the jewellery (or the art deco prints or the Depression glass – all of which I also collect) but I’ve really got enough clothes even allowing for the ones that I resell. So I started hunting around in other categories. I suppose it should have struck me sooner that the one thing I could buy there were books – but somehow the notion that people actually got rid of their books (other than the trashy ones you buy at airports or the ones you get from a book club that you forgot to send back and therefore languish forever on a hidden shelf). But on a search for Kay Neilsen (who’s work I also collect) I stumbled across the antique books bit.

This was heaven. I loathe and abominate brand new books and here were pages upon pages of glorious second hand books –with tipped in colour plates and embossed covers and foxing and the names of the people who’d owned them before on the titles page and bits a bit ripped. Sheer bliss. So I started to collect the books that I remember from home – childrens books, and poetry books and ancient recipe books and good old fashioned story books and every day the postman knocks at the door bearing yet another couple of parcels for me and I’m able to wallow in all these old friends that I hadn’t seen for years.

But this week things got a bit silly. I was just trawling through these pages when I came upon a job lot of sci-fi. Proper sci-fi, written in those halcyon days when sci-fi wasn’t a joke genre – Moorcock and Arthur C Clarke, Wells, Anderson, Aldiss, LeGuin, Vonnegut and a million more. I think that there were about 50 books in this lot and I’ve been gobbling up a couple a day.

And here is the problem. I can quite happily go on buying all the books that I remember reading and enjoying and I will – its actually surprising me how well I’m remembering and tracking down authors that I read 15 or 20 years ago, quite obscure not famous authors at that. But I also need some new books to read otherwise I’ll spend my life rereading stuff until I know it off by heart and that’s a bit pointless.

So. I’d like you to recommend books to me. Not books that you think are great intellectual masterpieces, or books that “everyone” should read or books the titles of which will make you look superior in the comments box (herebe) or books that you think I’ll like from the way I write or authors I’ve mentioned but the books that you read and read and read again. The ones that, when it’s rainy afternoon, when the world is a miserable place, when you have an early night, when you’re having “me” time that you pull down from the shelves and still love.

I won’t promise faithfully that I’ll post a review of them when I read them. But I do promise faithfully that I’ll add the titles to my searches and should they turn up I’ll bid for them.

Please help. I need something new to read.

Hendrix Cat

“laugh till it hurts and hurt till you laugh”

Came across the above while rereading the Alexandria Quartet (not herebe’s copy - I don’t know who stole herebe’s copy but it definitely wasn’t me) The first time I read this book it I loved it. This time, I lived it. That phrase sums up the whole trick to being alive.

When I started blogging I swore I wasn’t going to read anyone else’s blogs. But the best laid plans of mice (read Douglas Adams) and men oft go astray and now I would as soon miss my morning coffee as miss checking out the below writers. In fact I think they should quit their jobs and spend all day, every day updating their blogs so that I can read more.

Herebemonsters. The ubermensch has returned and this time he’s doing an MA in English Lit…check out the “what is the novel?” entries on the days you’re feeling exceptionally brainy. Achingly funny, screamingly sad, hairsplitting to the nth degree and always brilliant plus he got a book deal without taking his knickers off.

Mint-tea and Sympathy. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Collette is alive and well and living in Edinburgh. A wonderful, gentle, invigorating blog that makes you realise that the world isn’t such a bad place after all.

Bridget who? As a child who’s parents believed (and still believe) that the perfect home is a plot of land with a pile of rubble on it (so much potential) I am enthralled by her accounts of renovating her flat. Bridget, borrow that camping stove, pick up a pickaxe and don’t stop writing.

One Bad Way. A blog unlike any other blog I have ever read. It doesn’t pretend to be worldly, literary or wise and manages to be all three. Unfortunately defunct as the writers boss found out about it. He promises to return. I’m counting the minutes until he does.

Naked Blog Linking to this is like sending coals to Newcastle, if you read or write blogs then you will read the Naked Blogger. But if you’ve just found your way to this page cos you were trying to find out exactly what Dave Lee Roth did with brown m&m’s then do yourself a favour and hit the link. Simply unmissable.

A Free Man In Preston. I’m not entirely sure where Preston is. But should I ever need go there then I’ll follow the trail of mayhem and surrealism that this writer leaves. If you work in an open plan office do not attempt to surreptiously read this while pretending that you’re working - you’ll laugh too loudly.

Following in the tradition of all the best speeches, there may be some that I have omitted to mention. Sorry.

It’s a tricky question and one that doubtless sums up your personality way better than all these wonderfully silly and highly addictive quizilla tests that you find on other peoples blogs. Just so you know - vamp, cashmere, Frida Kahlo, leather boots, mysterious kiss, Ashton Kutcher, apparently I’m gonna marry him which is a bummer cos I was slanting my answers to get Johnny Depp or Viggo Mortensen - but only if they keep with the long hair and scruffy clothes, and…nerdslut. Now the question isn’t what the fuck is a nerdslut? But…how do you organise your books? Presupposing of course that you have any - strange as it may seem, some people don’t.

I can never forget visiting a school friend when I was about eleven and being amazed that the only book in the house was the telephone directory. I couldn’t understand it - I thought they must be very poor. (OK…OK… I thought they were common - I was an extremely snobbish child). As her dad was a coal merchant poverty obviously wasn’t the case, whereas we were on our uppers - admittedly in mum’s case they were pink calfskin uppers with wooden heels - which went great with the desert issue WW1 motorcycle combats she’d nicked from my greatgrandad - eat your heart out SJP. At the time, mum was planting vegetables that the rabbits my bro was shooting were eating (sitting targets) so we could eat (and there’s an example of a very short food chain). In spite of having no money, we always had books. Floor to ceiling. Hundreds of them. By the way - while my bro was catching rabbits and mum was digging potatoes I was also contributing to the survival of the family - I was making friends with the coal mans daughter which is a valuable asset when your cheques are more rubber than Michelin and you live in a house with stone floors, no central heating, double glazing, insulation or doors that fit properly.

The point of this meandering is that today I was forced to rearrange the bookcase. I’ve spent since 7pm on Friday night almost continuously on Flash which is a form of torture and captivity that Amnesty should be campaigning about. (Liberation for us nerdsluts shall be the cry) Never mind debugging movies, Flash is de bugger. I’ve tweened, instanced, symbolised, alpha’ed, hotspotted, rolled-over, action scripted, converted everything including the cat to buttons so by this morning I was a gibbering, shaking, scarlet eyed idiot only capable of wandering round the house muttering things like //:when kettle boils GoTo (andmake) coffee.

No change there then and as far as I’m aware a working (or not) knowledge of Flash isn’t usually the precursor to the contemplation of life’s mysteries. No, the problem can be placed squarely at F’s door. Or the door the computer room - which this morning was one and the same place. He’s been blasting a remix through the netosphere so if your heads been inexplicably pounding recently its probably because you got the drum tracks passing through on their way to LA.

The first hour wasn’t too bad. I got dressed, had coffee, washed the skirting boards and the tops of the doors. Plucked my eyebrows (unevenly - as usual), did some washing. Filed my nails Did some more washing. Started to twitch. Curled my hair - with tongs - no mean feat, my hair’s very long. Did some more washing. (no I don’t have a lot of washing really but I colour code it…its not a crime though it does get expensive on the soap powder.) Started to wander round the house. Began to understand why the cat (the real Hendrix cat) is given to yowling for no reason. I could have gone out I suppose but for the past week I’ve been suffering from the grumpts ( for the uninitiated - the grumpts are different from being grumpy or moody or PMS. Possibly the closest approximation I can give is… remember when you were three and wanted to wear your wellies all the time just so you could stomp. That’s the grumpts.)
Dispossessed I stood in front of the computer room door.

“But what shall I do” I wailed

It was like the Wizard of Oz. Bright light, booming noises and lots of smoke wafting out into the audience chamber (the hall) before a strange, disembodied voice called out.

“Whatever you want - chill, have a day off - read a book”

Read a book - a great suggestion. I read all the time, on buses, while I have a coffee, in the bath, on the loo, while the TV’s on. Every room in the house has several books with their pages turned over in a heap somewhere close to hand, yet somehow just sitting down to read isn’t something that I tend to do. Call it a misplaced work ethic. “Just” reading, smacks of not doing anything and I can’t not do anything, it makes me bad tempered because I start to worry about my life ticking away and all the things I could/should/ought be doing instead. Reading a book in bed is dangerous because no matter what I have to do the next day I’ll stay up all night to finish it. If it’s an especially good book - when I’ve finished it I’ll turn back to page one and start it again and then if I really love it then I’ll read it again but just the bits I especially like. Books have always been the best bunch of friends I’ve had. (If that sounds sad, think for a moment - where else are you going to meet such wildly diverging, entertaining, witty, intelligent people?) There’s a lot of books that I know practically word for word because I’ve read them so many times. I use them to reaffirm, remark on and reassure stages in my life. Whenever I move into a new house I reread Tolkien- all of him not just LOTR - he wrote a lot of other stuff too. I admit I do have a soft spot for him. Smith of Wooton Major was the first book I ever read on my own - age 6 and the first time I stayed up all night (8 years) was to finish the Lord of the Rings so my night owl tendencies and therefor my misspent youth may be directly attributed to the siege of Gondor.

Today, with the glorious silver rain we had in Edinburgh, was definitely a Lawrence day - that’s TE not DH (I feel that DH is the Sting of the literary world as far as sanitising and over intellectualising his characters and cashing in on his roots) I love the Seven Pillars - and yes I know most of it is a work of fiction. So what? - if we have to listen to lies about the Middle East then Lawrence beats Blair hands down. I admit to being furious that he (Lawrence not Blair who I’m just plain furious with) subjugated himself and his dream to the Empire but on the rereading I loved him more for his humanity (which no-one could attribute to Blair). Yesterday, though I felt the need to reread The Mint - one of the most beautifully lyrical and poetical books written. Reading The Mint is like watching the ripples of a raindrop on a dark pool. There’s a stillness, a lyricism and a desperate, calm weight in his depiction of his failing body and tortured soul and the men he lived and worked with.

So that was the plan. Sofa here I come. I made a pot of tea, grabbed my cigarettes and went to get the book. I couldn’t find it. Bugger. In fact - the closer I looked at the bookshelves - the more I realised that I couldn’t find any of my books. At least not the ones I wanted. Jilly Cooper was crammed in next to Shakespeare (and before you get all artsy about JC - you try and write one) and Oscar Wilde was sitting beside Scott. (Yes - I like Scott) It was literally a literary bomb site. I would have to impose some sort of order.

Dragging all the books in the house off the shelves and stacking them on the kitchen floor was the easy part. The problem was - what sort of order to arrange them in?. Alphabetically would be a mish mash. Besides which there’s something sad about books that are arranged in alphabetical order, it negates the actual content of the pages and instantly tags you as the sort of person who doesn’t have the imagination to read. By genre - ditto. Fiction/non-fiction? Vague possibilities but too limiting in the long run and lets not even get started on whether a book (as written by a human and therefore a subjective being) can ever truly be non-fiction.

OK - start with an overall order - reference books to go in the computer room, airport books (Jilly Cooper) and crappy modern novels (Barnes, Welsh, Burgess etc.) in the shelf behind the wardrobe in the bedroom, decent books in the kitchen. Comfy books (Chalet school, Angela Brazil, Terry Prachett - which need to be hidden as I’ve been stealing them from my bro. for the past seven years, on a separate shelf in the bedroom for the days when I have flu) Favourite books in the centre of the top shelf of the main bookcase in the kitchen and all books to be roughly indexed according to theme. Should be easy enough - after all there’s supposed to be only four stories in the world.

No hostess has ever done a placement with more care than my consideration of where to put those bloody books. Just as when you’re a child you imagine your toys to have wild and dangerous lives of their own as soon as you leave the bedroom or turn off the light (well I did - hence my trauma when my brother hung Lucy) so too have books. There are certain authors you can’t put next to each other because they’d fight.

So Tolkien in the middle. Next to him, the Perelandra trilogy, as Lewis nicked the idea of Numeanor from Tolkien and because Tolkien and Lewis were good friends. On the other side of Tolkien went Heaney’s Beowulf and Audens Norse mythology, slipping in Yeats (the Celtic connection) the Egyptian Book of the Dead next (because of the historical migration of the Norsemen from Egypt) and then you’re set with Durrell and after that its a hop skip and jump through modern works about the Middle East/Judaism and the Islamic Book of the Dead to Lawrence. So far so good. On the other side, Lewis led into Peake and then Blake (all share idealised view of a mythical England) then Elliot (London and violent imagery), Wilde sort of fits (if you stretch the idealised view theory to include his satire on the class systems) and Saki can slot next to Wilde to at the far end of the shelf for the same reason. The complete works of Dorothy Parker’s relatively thin so that can pop in and fill an gap. Dead easy.

You can put Thompson next to Collette if you put my Mothers House beside Lark Rise to Candleford (both peaceable, tranquil books for a rainy afternoon) and if you start the row with Thompson you can put the Mitford sisters stuff beside Collette (as they would get on well at a dinner table - and if they didn’t then they’d be too well mannered to cause a scene) and then Lee ” As I walked out… can go next. and while we’re on the subject Keroauc (since all he seemed to write about was people walking places whilst eating raisins there’s obviously a Mediterranean link there somewhere) then you can put Joyce and A Clockwork Orange together and then obviously (well obvious to me) Orwell’s 1984 and Huxleys (all of it) goes next although there is a case for putting Chrome Yellow beside Saki on the top shelf and then Catcher in the Rye (disenchanted youth theme) leads nicely into Whitman. Whitman into Hemmingway, O Brien (If I die in a combat zone etc…honestly the Vietnam war didn’t last long enough for all the books he wrote about it) Milligan’s war memoirs ( no I wouldn’t put them with humorous books - if you disagree reread them) Rollins (a section on the inhumanity of man is incomplete without Rollins) Popular belief would put Nietzsche beside anything on the second world war ( although I personally don’t subscribe to that) and as his theory on eternal recurrence is similar to Crowley then you have a ready made section on comparative religion and ritual magic - so Mc Gregor Mathers, Blavatsky and Regardie can all file in. (Yes they’d probably fight later on but don’t you get the impression that they enjoyed it?) And because modern physics is coming to realise that we may just live in a positively curved infinitely expanding universe you can put Hawkin, Dawkin, Penrose and Davies there too. Thank god for Plato - dear sweet uncomplicated Plato - he quite cheerfully disposed of three shelves which I was able to fill with the making of the modern European mind - Plato to Wittengstein, figuring that if they were on my reading list then better minds than I had said it was ok to lump them together.

Following this theme most of the books slotted in quite nicely but there were several problems. Sci-fi for a start. Yes I know it’s a problem for a lot of people but I’m a seventies child and was weaned on Aldiss, Omni and Howard. Where do you put Moorcock? (leaving aside the obvious; the bin, winner of the Turner Prize and all other sarky answers) because his concept of the eternal champion (far too tricky to explain at this late hour) means you could pop him beside Nietzsche while his theories on parallel universes mean that he could be placed next to the physicist’s but can you really put a sci-fi author next to a philosopher? (you can put anyone beside a scientist - they don’t count) And Asimov? would you stack him beside Moorcock and therefore start a shelf devoted to science fiction or could you slip him next to studies on new technology since he not only brought the term robotics into modern usage but also invented the three laws on robotics which ( I think) are used to develop them. While there’s a case for putting Castenada next to O Leary (as O Leary refused him entrance to the island where they were all conducting their experiments with LSD Castenada went away and started to write his series on the knowledge of Don Juan - that’s the Indian sorcerer not the seducer) given their altercation that might be unwise. So then you could put him beside Crowley - comparative religion and esoteric knowledge but really that’s a bit like putting Topsy and Tim next to the works of Shakespeare ( bottom shelf next to AA Milne - not for any reason than they’re both big books and that was the tallest shelf.) In the end I cheated and put him in the ref section beside native American mythology which gave me an excuse to add all the books on myth and fairy tales (although come to think of it I could have put them beside Tolkien) Sorting the feminist authors was easy, (no, not because I don’t have any) I filed them next to the music biographies. It may seem strange to put Greer beside The Hammer of the Gods ( Biography of Led Zep which title wise that could have slipped in beside Nietzsche) but file in a slim volume ( thank god) of essays about women in rock music and a smidgen of Camille whatshername and you’re set to add Diamond Dave, Motorhead, Rolling Stones and the making of Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club band. (Not F’s I hasten to add as he’s still not speaking to me for letting slip that he drinks tea- his taste runs more to Hawkins and Penrose) but do you think it’s a swizz to then use works on Popism (linked by title only) as an escape hatch for all the post modernist readers which I didn’t even read when I was doing the course.

It must say something about your personality. I’m sure it must. Because at the end of six hours of scurrying, sorting, putting a book on the shelf only to take it off again twenty minutes later after realising that it would fit in better four shelves down in a different room I sat down to a cup of tea and a brief flick through the pile of bloody German authors that I couldn’t put anywhere (I mean where do you put the Germans? For such a regimented society their literature defies any sort of classification other than alphabetical, well apart from Freud who I stuck next to Jung and a thick book on the meaning of dreams.) After ten minutes flicking I realised, to my horror, that I’d arranged my bookcase according to the rules of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. What does that say about my character? I don’t even want to begin to think about it? I would rather be a nerdslut I really would.

And I still didn’t find The Mint…