Nick was fulminating after leaving the ATM about the irony inherent in the fact that “Please insert your card” was crushed down into the corner to make way for an enormous, flashing “We care about customer service!” sign.

ME: It’s like when we used to have those “Keep Left” signs in the stairwell in my building, remember? And the Socialist Alternative would always stick their rally posters over them. I thought that was hilarious.
NICK: Hmmm.
ME: “Keep Left”? “Socialist Alternative”? Get it?
NICK: Hmmm.
ME: You don’t get it, do you?
NICK: Oh, I get it.
ME: But you don’t think it’s funny?
NICK: I’d just be annoyed that a sign that was intended to assist people had been obliterated . . .
ME: You pompous twat!
NICK: I’m a UX guy, Treena.

Don’t worry: you can still skip over these posts if they become too boring. But I have tried harder this time to make the title of the books visible, which—whether my purpose is solipsistic or practical—seems a key concern.

Mind, the pictures in this case are on a funny angle, because this is the middle bookshelf in the hallway, and I couldn’t get far enough back from the shelves to take a straight shot. But, really, it all adds an illusion of artiness to the project.

This is the most recent of the shelves, which Nick’s father made over the last Christmas holidays. I think it was this past Christmas, anyway. It had to be made narrower than the others so that all three would fit in the hallway without blocking any doorways (which didn’t bother me, but Nick claimed would be highly inconvenient).

Oddly, it was only after this shelf went in that I told Nick that I was slightly worried that the house was starting to look like a slightly disreputable secondhand bookshop. (It’s odd, because prior to that I’d always secretly hoped that the house would one day look like a disreputable secondhand bookshop.)

The painting on the top of this bookcase is a print of one of Sydney Lough Thompson’s paintings; he was a New Zealand-born Impressionist, and also Nick’s great-grandfather. Coming as I do from a line of anonymous peasants, I find it quite fascinating that Nick’s great-grandfather has his own Wikipedia page. (I mean, sure, it’s Wikipedia. But it’s still cool.)

(In case anyone is really interested, some of his paintings are here, although the site’s in French, and—even more astonishing to me than Wikipedia—there’s even a Youtube video, also in French but with some nice images of his works. See, the blog is educational!)

I’ve managed to retain most of this shelf, although that is Nick’s copy of Charles Stross’s Halting State lying horizontally up there—horizontal books on these shelves are a sure sign that space is desperately short elsewhere.

The copy of the Brothers Grimm I bought down in Sydney as a necessary tool for the thesis. I mentioned back in March that I ended up with multiple copies of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales: the Grimm tales were part of the same process, in that my author also rewrote several of these tales for her own journal. But the tales that she chose were fairly obscure ones, often not reprinted in incomplete collections, so I bought this complete edition. It’s good to have on the shelf, but it never actually made it into the bibliography for the Ph.D.; I defaulted to a late-Victorian translation by Margaret Hunt that I found on Project Gutenberg, as a more contemporary version of the tales.

How cool is The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, though? Everyone should have this on their shelf! No, seriously. Of course, this isn’t the most recent edition, but it’s still a fairly comprehensive survey of a wide range of authors.

It would also make a useful doorstop, if I were inclined to treat books in such a cavalier fashion.

But the books on this shelf that I love the most are those three slim, green volumes on the right: those are volumes seven, twelve, and fourteen of All the Year Round, conducted—as they point out on the spine, and the front cover, and the title page, just in case you didn’t see it the first two times—by Charles Dickens. Actually, all the volumes at that end of the shelf are Victorian periodicals, but these are the most exciting. Because of Charles Dickens, really.

Certainly, it’s far from a complete set—though I hope to pick up more in time; I bought these ones at the wonderful Berkelouw’s Book Barn in Berrima, the most alliterative antiquarian bookshop in Australia—but they’re fascinating. Volume 7, for example, has the fabulously titled “The Wicked Woods of Tobereevil,” by the Author of “Hester’s History” (seemingly, based on a quick Google search, by a woman called Rosa Gilbert, but don’t quote me on that) while volume 14 has “A Charming Fellow” by Frances Trollope. I could go on, but I won’t—I just never cease to be fascinated by how inexpensively one can buy some Victorian periodicals (although I did just pay a lot more than I did for these for a pair of much rarer volumes. But that’s another story).

Frankly, the first thought that springs to mind when I look at this shelf is a sense of surprise that I own two hardback James Herriot books. He’s a fun read, especially in the early days, but I didn’t think I bought him in hardback.

Most of these are Nick’s books, though—including the rather embarrassing Masters of Doom, although I admit that I did buy that for him. But there’s Tunnels: since I’ve written not one but two posts on that book, it seems only fitting that its picture should turn up on here at some point.

And I do love that Louisa May Alcott hardback: it’s mostly short stories, which I hadn’t read before. Some of them, of course, are intensely saccharine; I imagine that they were originally written for children’s periodicals or Christmas giftbooks and, while Alcott never patronised her child-readers, she did write some intensely sentimental works. Still, I’ve always loved Little Women—though the final book, Jo’s Boys, both bewildered and devastated me—so it’s delightful to come across a whole pile of her works that I’d never read before. Another Lifeline Bookfest find, of course.

Hey, Jasper Fforde! I love those books—and he’s so prolific, there’ll probably be another out before long. But those are exactly my cup of tea, and I’ll keep reading them as long as he keeps writing them. They remind me—in a circuitous fashion—of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but with less sex.

(Mind, Nick and I were watching Press Gang recently, and in the episode “UnXpected”—which deals with the illness of an actor who once starred in a Doctor Who/James Bond-style TV show—the character explains that he once spent two weeks inside The Hound of the Baskervilles thanks to a “fictionalising ray” but he escaped with another minor character. When the man he’s talking to says, “There’s no character of that name in Hound of the Baskervilles!” he urbanely responds, “Not now.” Nick turned to me and said, “Hang on, did Steven Moffat just invent Jasper Fforde?”)

I’m going to skip over everything else on this shelf (I’ve already expressed some concerns about the Twilight series, twice) except to note that I’m fairly certain that’s my copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology over there on the left.

Ah. No, that’s not a book called Who’s Who in Enid Blyton. It’s some sort of highly specific mirage. No, honestly.

On the other hand, that book next to the mirage is a gorgeous facsimile reprint of the stories from The Return of Sherlock Holmes as they appeared in The Strand Magazine. I’m a sucker for facsimile reprints, but the loveliest ones—a growing collection of Victorian and Edwardian children’s fantasy novels—are in the living room.

I also find that collection of Alcott’s sensation fiction two books down from the Conan Doyle absolutely fascinating: I know Alcott herself was rather ashamed of her “pot-boilers”—as was Jo March, in Good Wives—but they’re good sensation narratives, and a far less idyllic account of the opportunities available to women than the Little Women series is.

Oh, dear: I seem to have truncated Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. That’s a shame. That’s the book that taught me that the ancient Sumerians—to whom I once referred as “Numerians,” to which my brother responded, “I suppose they were very good at arithmetic?”—called librarians “Ordainers of the Universe.” I have aspired to that title ever since.

I think that’s a complete set of L. M. Montgomery, too, although I may be lacking some of the short stories. The Anne books do get rather irritating after a while, but Anne of Green Gables remains utterly delightful every time I read it. And down towards the end is a copy of The Blue Castle: I never read that as a child, not until I bought it (at, surprisingly, the Lifeline Bookfest) a couple of years ago, and was quite astonished. It’s a fairy tale, of course, with a happy marriage to end things, but the fascinating aspect of it is the monotonous horror of the heroine’s early life—the sheer drudgery of being poor but of “good family,” thoroughly devalued for being an unmarried woman in a family that sees spinsterhood as the ultimate failure, unable to do anything independently, not even reading. It’s devastating, in a way.

But then Montgomery is often most interesting in the back stories of minor characters and in short stories: the women with illicit sex lives, with illegitimate children, with dark secrets. Little of this comes through in her best-known works, but some of the short stories show a much darker side to late-Victorian and Edwardian life than you’d ever imagine from the Anne books.

I’ve become overly prolific in my love of books, again—but I should point out Nick’s pride and joy, The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction. He’d wanted it for years, but baulked a little at the price. I found that one in a Lifeline store in Narellan for $5, and thus cemented my position as best girlfriend ever.

$5 is a small price to pay for such a honour.

Well, technically, this is stage one of three, one side of the hallway being entirely lined with shelves. Oh, it was a happy day when I realised the hallway would sustain bookshelves! Lucky for Nick, it’s a narrow hallway, or there’d be shelves running down both walls. I did suggest it, actually, but Nick vetoed it on the grounds that it would be inconvenient to have to walk down the hall sideways.

The hallway bookcases, though, are the very shallow ones that my father-in-law made for us. Well, three of those—the original two are still in the living room. I love those bookcases: they just swallow books, and they don’t attract dust as obviously as ready-bought bookcases. Honestly, do the people who design bookcases not actually own any books? They make the shelves such inconvenient sizes.

(Actually, that’s just reminded me: I took the idea of putting shelves in the hallway from Who Magazine, back when I used to read it. I’d forgotten that. They briefly ran a page in the back of the magazine with allegedly fun ideas for each month: one example I remember was “take an embroidery class, then scatter silver butterflies over your skirts and T-shirts,” which I thought was an oddly specific use of your newfound skills. But on one occasion they recommended buying cheap bookcases—I wish they’d told us where to find those mythical creatures, the cheap bookcases—then paint them bright red and put them in the hallway, filled with colourful paperbacks. I was slightly appalled at the expense and effort involved in using books as set decorations—at no point did they actually suggest you might already own the books—but it did remind me of my hallway’s bookcaseless state.)

What I mainly like about this picture is how beautifully the Chagall print has turned out. (Ignore the matting: I know it looks like the print is by someone called “Marc Caoall.” I’ll fix that at some point.)

(The print was a Christmas gift, and I had to undergo a brief but intense battle of wills with my three-year-old nephew when he wanted to open it himself. I even tried misdirection: “Look, there’re the presents Auntie Treena bought you! Look, they’ve got ribbons and everything!” There’s something about preventing a child from opening a Christmas present that makes you feel like a cad. Luckily, his fingers were too small to get the top off the tube.)

(Does that anecdote make me look like a total monster?)

This top shelf’s a weird mixture of my books and Nick’s, but what I really want to know is why I don’t have those Iain M. Banks books together. That’s unusually sloppy. The Banks books are Nick’s; I don’t read him, having unfortunately started with Complicity, which scarred me for life. It doesn’t matter how many times Nick points out the difference between Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks, I’m still not reading more. Although I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that I didn’t start with The Wasp Factory.

I also note some of my Kurt Vonnegut books are on this shelf, over to the far right: I haven’t read Timequake in years and I only recently read Deadeye Dick. But the strange thing is that I have almost a complete collection of Kurt Vonneguts—I don’t have A Man Without a Country, though I’ve read it—so I wonder where the rest are. Why aren’t they on this shelf?

Ditto Sylvia Plath: I can see the copy of The Bell Jar that I bought for a third-year course on women’s writing and Ariel next to it, but I own another copy of The Bell Jar, surely? And her diaries? Why aren’t they all together?

And just to give you an even lower opinion of my classification system, I seem to have lodged The Prime of Miss Jean Brody next to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. I’m sure there was a reason for that.

For some reason, the next two shelves are mostly Nick’s books. (Which reminds me: I wonder if he’s ever going to read those Alastair Reynolds? They look pretty, and all, but I might shift them into another room. Maybe then I can fit some more Kurt Vonnegut on there, if I can find them. And I still haven’t spotted my copy of the Heaney translation of Beowulf. Where is that?)

But I am building up a nice collection of Victorian detective fiction. Almost all of them are about male detectives: I do have a collection of stories of early women detectives, somewhere. I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s not here.

And I really must buy the next in Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes saga. Actually, the fourth must be out now, although maybe not in paperback.

Hmm. My main intention here was to remind myself what I already had, not to make a list of what I still need to buy.

Hey, look, Agatha Christie! Some part of me thinks it would be nice to have these all in one binding, but I’m resisting the impulse to rebuy what must amount to forty-odd books.

But those numbered black-and-white books to the left of the shelf below the main Christies are brilliant. I found those at a Lifeline Bookfest, and they’re collections of old-school detective-fiction novellas, divided into themed collections: Women Sleuths, Police Procedurals, Locked Room Puzzles, and Great British Detectives. The books are oddly narrow and the binding crackles ominously when you open them—you can’t read them in bed, but have to sit up to do so—but they’re so cool. And pretty. I wonder if there are more than four books in the series?

Ooh, Ivanhoe. I don’t think I’ve ever read that—I find Walter Scott a real slog for the first hundred pages or so, before the narrative really grabs you—and I have a sneaking suspicion that I own more than one copy. I have read The Three Musketeers, though—which is one the next shelf down—and thought it was hilarious. (Except for the bit where Athos hanged his wife. That was well weird.)

Nick and I once had an argument about the Lord Darcy stories, which are on the third shelf here: I really enjoyed them, but Nick unexpectedly came over strongly republican and said he couldn’t stomach all the kowtowing to the Plantagenets, which I’d largely skipped over. I suppose that’s why he doesn’t read much fantasy fiction: there’re far fewer kings in science fiction. And two down from Lord Darcy is William Morris’s North of Nowhere: I haven’t read it, but I’m not the woman to turn down the chance to buy an obscure Victorian novel.

Oh, and hey! There’s my copy of Sylvia Plath’s diaries: last time I read those, I was completing my Honours year. I think it’s best to draw a veil over my resultant state of mind.

Okay, I realise this picture makes the carpet look really grubby, but it’s not, I promise.

Also, Nancy Drew! I love Nancy—she was feisty. In some of the books, anyway. Not the ones where she let Ned do all the dirty work. (One bookshelf over I have a “Nancy Clue” novel, which is slash fiction involving Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames—as Cherry Aimless—who was a nurse in her own series of books. Not usually my cup of tea, but I found it in the children’s section of an Alumni Book Sale. I’m all for children having an open view of life, but this was perhaps a little too explicit to sit next to Lucy M. Boston and Helen Cresswell. Plus, it makes a good anecdote.)

This has to be the geekiest pair of shelves in the entire house: my Nancy Drews—with some random Ray Bradburys propping them up at the end—and then Nick’s entire collection of Doctor Who Target novelisations. And that’s not even including his New Adventures and Missing Adventures, which are all in the spare room.

Still, I suppose you never know when you might want to read that one about the giant maggots again.

I’ve just been faffing around, quickly tidying over the surfaces of a generally clean house before my father-in-law comes around for dinner.

So I was dashing through the kitchen with an armload of clean washing, and I gave an open drawer a quick push to shut it as I passed.

Behind me, a tinny little voice from the closing drawer shouted “Exterminate!”

It was a full ten seconds before I realised the talking Dalek bottle opener must have fallen into something metal and activated itself.

There’s a lesson in this: if something scared you senseless as a child, don’t buy a talking version of it as a kitchen implement, no matter how cool it makes you look at parties.

And that’s sequentially upload images of my bookshelves on to the blog.

I do actually have some quite good reasons for doing this. Some are just solipsistic (example: I just like looking at books. Preferably other people’s books, but my own will do if there are no others available) and some are practical (I don’t have a decent catalogue of the books, which worries me slightly).

But the main impulse is practical. I love my books, and I’m radically running out of space. People do tell me that I should stop buying them (or worse: my mother once suggested that I throw a book away for every new book I buy) but the short answer is that I can’t.

I do restrict myself to the best of my ability, but it’s more than flesh and blood can stand to walk past a bookshop without looking in. And once you look in, you inevitably find something you want. And . . . well, the end result is you start posting pictures of your bookshelves onto the Internet just so you can be sure what you actually own.

So this might be dull. Might be exciting. Who knows?

But it’s rather a big task, and I’m not going to devote every entry to it for the next two weeks. That would be dull, no question.

Listening to Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is blocking the noise of the gravel shovelling and calming me down.

My cup of coffee is hyping me up.

As a result, my brain is vibrating helplessly between the two states, which doesn’t aid the construction of lucid, elegant prose.

The process is something like this:

CALM: What a soothing piece of music. Ah! I remember! I need that section from chapter two to make this argument flow more smoothly . . .

HYPED: No! That’s ridiculous. Hey! Hey! Hey! No, pay attention! Hey! Hey! D’you know what would be fun? If we played tennis! That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? Ooh, shiny thing. No, wait—it’s not that shiny. But that’s shiny! That’s really shiny. Wait, was that a noise? Was there a noise behind me? Was it a spider? I bet it was a spider. Hey! Hey! No, pay attention! Hey! Want to play tennis?

It’s like having a toddler in your head.

I’m sure I used to be productive. I’m fairly sure, in addition, that that period of productivity was only last week.

I wish I could remember how I did that.

I’ve made the point a couple of times—as have, of course, many people before me, as I mentioned in that post—that far from existing in an ivory tower removed from reality, much academic work takes place among a myriad of irritations.

Take today, for instance. So far, my attempts to continue an article on adaptations of nineteenth-century serials to the mid-Victorian suburban stage have gone something like this:

Wake up. Don’t enjoy waking up, but it has to be done. Still, a cup of coffee is always a good way to go.

Have a cup of coffee. Think about having another cup of coffee, but realise I haven’t finished the first one yet, so it’s probably a bit soon.

Work off some excess energy (from all the coffee) by playing Wii Tennis for fifteen minutes.

Play around on my social-networking sites briefly, trying to find a raincloud for a set in Packrat, as well as moderating and responding to comments on the blog.

Start a debate with Nick on Pownce about whether it would be advisable to have the same actor playing the Doctor for twenty years of Doctor Who. Since we both think this would be a bad idea, the debate is rather futile, but that’s all right—it segues into a fairly snarky discussion of who knows what about folkloric beliefs regarding human eyes.

Have another cup of coffee.

This is standard morning routine, and I’m ready to work by about 9 a.m.

Settle down to the draft—hovering at a fairly useless 1300 words—and realise I need to put a load of washing on.

Choose bed linen, because I’ve just realised I have to clean out the spare room—currently a repository for electrical equipment—and make the bed up before my parents arrive next week.

Come back to the draft, which hasn’t grown any longer in the interim.

Realise there’s a man next door doing something with an enormous pile of gravel, which makes an irregular but frustrating noise when he starts shovelling it.

Reach a possible breakthrough on reorganising the chapter.

Get a message on Facebook, reiterating this argument about whether French dictionaries are boring. Answer brusquely but resolve to ignore any responses.

Realise the washing machine is beeping, meaning it’s developed a problem.

Go and fix the problem.

Come back to the draft. Decide where to put the reorganised material, and decide I need to print the draft out to look at it properly.

Realise the washing machine is now chiming, meaning the cycle is finished.

Put the washing out, put a new load on.

E-mail my draft to myself so I can access it from Nick’s machine and print it out. Wonder why I can’t print from my machine.

Hear the man with the shovel and the gravel move around so he is now directly under my study windows.

Answer a phone call from my mother, who wants to know if I want the papers stored in her spare-room wardrobe. Decide it’s best simply for her to bring them all up next week and sort them out here.

Realise the damn washing machine is beeping again, but I’m still on the phone.

Start to worry that my mother is going to run through every item in the wardrobe over the phone, so ask her to stick everything in a box and bring it all up.

Hang up, and worry I’ve been brusque with my mother.

Restart the washing machine.

Get back to printing out the draft. Safari won’t load, so I can’t access the e-mail. Force quit Safari, and realise the washing machine is beeping again.

Restart the washing machine.

Print out the draft.

Realise the damn washing machine is beeping again.

Curse the washing machine, the person who invented washing machines, the manufacturers of this particular washing machine, and the people who sold it to us.

Realise I’m going to have to fill the washing machine manually, with a bucket.

Sit down with the draft.

Washing machine beeps again.

Restart the machine again. Contemplate running away to join the circus—but not as laundress.

Sit down with the draft, locate the section where I want to add more material, write “Furthermore,”.

Hear the washing machine beep. This time, it can’t decide between hot and cold water. Hit the “Warm” button: machine starts working. Wonder why it couldn’t figure that out on its own; realise its CPU has been exclusively devoted to a range of irritating beeps.

Think about having another cup of coffee.

Decide blogging is a safer alternative.

Of course, a lot of this comes about because I’m working at home and trying to do a little light housework on the side. Much of this could be avoided if I were to work in my office—but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

But if anyone finds an ivory tower—at a reasonable rate, of course—would they let me know?

I have no real idea what prompted this, except for Nick’s constant habit of strewing bits of his work clothing around the house when he gets home.

ME: Nick, is that your shirt you’ve left lying over the back of the sofa?
NICK (whisking his shirt away): I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you been at the laudanum again?

To provide context, I am addicted to Wii Tennis, as result of which I think I have Wii-Tennis elbow.

NICK (freshly home from work): How are you?
ME: I think I’ve done myself an injury.
NICK: A ninja-ry? Is that like when you’re a ninja . . .
ME: Go away.
NICK: . . . . and you have an accident. Like, you drop a shuriken on your foot.
ME: What type of ninja would drop a shuriken on his foot?
NICK: Well, not a very good one.

So, I was making myself a cup of coffee.

As you do.

I had the espresso made up on the stove.

Once the kettle boiled, I picked it up, to top up my cup with hot water.

Then I realised I hadn’t actually poured any of the coffee into my cup.

I could, of course, have simply put the kettle back down, picked the coffee pot up, and made coffee in the usual fashion.

But, no. I decided it made more sense to pick the coffee pot up in my left hand, while still holding a kettle’s worth of boiling water in my right hand, and try and make the cup of coffee that way.

And then . . . well, does anyone else remember that old Dilbert cartoon where Dogbert was running a training school for self-serve garage attendants, and Scott Adams couldn’t figure out how to end the story line, so he had them all die from papercuts sustained in a map-folding exercise?

It didn’t end up anything like that.

But it could have.

The point of this? There is none.

But I think the lesson to be learned from all this is that I would benefit from drinking less coffee.