Books that follow me home from the shops

I have never been able to walk past a second-hand bookshop without having a trance-like experience of someone leaning out to take me by the shoulder and drag me inside.  It’s nearly as bad at the general bookshops where I am always bailed up by those groaning tables of remaindered stock on the footpath (at practically all of them these days) and when I pass a few special ‘op shops’ that I know of, with caverns of wonderful musty volumes hidden down the back, where the books are not only grubby, but dirt cheap.

When a book is an absolute bargain it’s hard to pass up – even though you know deep down it may be more than 12 months (if indeed ever) before you get around to reading it – and by ‘reading’ I mean probably just selectively dipping in. 

My shelves are crammed with hardly opened volumes, but I keep bringing more home; and they then have to jostle for space on the bedside table with two or three current library books, or on my desk with the unread catalogues and newsletters, or on one of several coffee tables with the flicked-through subscription magazines and piles of out-of-date middle sections from past weekend newspapers. (I love the way the newspapers are all in sections these days, so that you can quickly pull out the meaty more readable supplements and discard the Sport, Employment, Real Estate and Business sections without a second glance.)

I’m well aware that my eyes are bigger than my reading capacity, but I’m saving this vast stock of reading material for some future long train or car journey – or for the time when I may find myself laid up with a broken leg, or perhaps recuperating in hospital for a few months after some unexpected, massive surgery.

Yesterday I just couldn’t pass up SuperFoods: Fourteen foods that will change your life (with must-read sections on tofu and pumpkin) and from a Welsh born Australian - Nerys Purchon’s Handbook of Herbs (good pages on herb tea blends, to justify yet another herbal) – and both only $5.95!  Last week it had been the RHS publication, Climbing Plants (only $4.95 and with a picture of my yearned for cobaea scandens!) and Stay young with yoga (my 6^th yoga book, but better illustrated than the ones I bought back in the sixties and later for an eighties revival). [I am going to take up yoga again you know, I just need to make that start!]

Earlier this year I picked up second-hand volumes of The Gourmet’s Garden by Sydneysider Richard Beckett (a bit dated – written 1975), and Outback and Beyond, by Sidney Nolan’s wife Cynthia, on their intrepid travels in the Australian centre, back in 1949.

Before that, two previously unvisited op. shops had yielded The Meaning of Life (Ed. Klemke), Flowers for the Australian Cottage Border (Sarah Guest) and a recipe book, Almost Vegetarian by Karen Meyer (striking a chord with its by-line - ‘for those who can’t quite make the break’), while in an antique shop I came upon the aforementioned Flow, by Csikszentmihalyi, a writer I had previously only come across on the net. 

I have to say that this is by no means a full list of my aquisitions; garden books are my biggest weakness and a few other recent finds have been the Reader’s Digest tome, Short Cuts to Great Gardens, an Australian classic, A Perfumed Garden, by Frances Kelly, and The Pleasures of Bush and Glasshouses (bought to inspire the completion of our half-finished shadehouse).

I love it when I can turn up an especially significant volume for a family member or friend.  (Like Tjilpi's friend M, who delighted him with a copy of the very apt Tracks, Scats and Other Traces, about Australian mammals).  Not long ago my son's girlfriend suprised me, too, with a little treasure - an anthology entitled My Favourite Plant (Ed. Kincaid), that she picked up at the Lifeline Bookfest.  There have been several obscure war histories that I acquired for my husband over the years, and I have just purchased the richly illustrated Spiders and their Web Sites, for my insect preoccupied grandson.

Other remaindered books that last year came home clasped to my bosom, were the RHS Encyclopaedia of Herbs, and permaculturist Jenny Allen’s Paradise In Your Garden, a FABULOUS book for which I would have happily paid full price.

I wonder which book I will find time for reading today.  Right now I’m flicking through my latest acquisition and contemplating putting together a cup of Nerys Purchon’s Refreshment Blend tea - made out of bergamot, lemon balm or lemon grass, borage leaves / flowers and lemon rind or orange peel.  That, I hope, will justify buying her book.

A  post script.  My husband has kindly offered to break a leg for me if it will help with my reading schedule - and even more so if it will mean seeing the tops of a few tables once again.

Comments

[Kati]

Reminds me of another book by Robert Munsch, "Mud Puddle".http://www.annickpress.com/catalog/mudpuddle.html As I recall, in this particular book for children there were terrible mud puddles that kept jumping on the heroine. I find books kinda follow me home like jumping mud puddles, too. I try so hard to resiiiisstt...

[Ronni Bennett]

I'm afflicted with the same book problem. Just can't resist. Some years ago, I made a new rule: if a new book comes into the house, another must go out.

I've never followed that rule.

[Tjilpi]

Thanks for the link Jude. I've changed topics from scats to pistols. Hope that doesn't scare people away! Tjilpi