When I wrote these notes—last Wednesday, while invigilating three in-class exams in a row—they were so clever, so insightful, so exactly what I needed to get the article back on track.

Now, six days later, they’re looking horribly like gibberish.

What I need is a Rosetta Stone—only instead of translating Egyptian via Greek, it could translate me via me.

I bet Think Geek sells something like that.

I certainly posted the “Bookshop Porn” pictures from last weekend’s bookshop rummaging, but I never posted the actual books I’d bought.

I’ve photographed them against an enormous but completely anonymous pile of marking, just to really drive home the fact that I won’t get to read them any time soon.

This first lot owes itself to my second job. I’ve been working two jobs this semester, though it sometimes feels like more. I said to Nick the other day, when I was marking late into the night, “I feel as though I’m working two jobs.”

He said, “You are working two jobs.”

“Oh,” I said. “In that case, it feels as though I’m working three jobs.”

Anyway, this second job (the reason the blogging’s fallen off) entailed, at one point, reading through a great deal of information on the 1970s’ adaptation of Arthur Upfield’s Bony novels, and I thought to myself, “Hmm, I really must read some Arthur Upfield.” I think I have a couple of his other books on my shelf somewhere, but it would take me at least a week to find them, so I simply bought ones that looked unfamiliar.

It’s a technique that usually works.

Then there’s the compulsory pile of children’s fantasy, which I tend to call “research materials,” as though I might one day actually do something with one of my own novels. (Unlikely.)

But I’m slowly collecting the seven volumes in Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom: once I have them all, I’ll start reading them. This one’s book five, so I can’t be too far off.

I like to pick up Margaret Mahy, because she has the career I’d like to have. Well, to be honest, I’d like to be Diana Wynne Jones, but I don’t have that in me, unfortunately. But I’ve spoken of Mahy before on the blog, so I’ll just slide straight on past her to the L. Frank Baum at the bottom there.

It’s always a delight to find one of these editions. I’m slowly—very slowly, far more slowly than with Garth Nix—buying up all the Oz books, and simultaneously trying to buy them all in facsimile reprints. (The theory is that I’ll then get rid of the non-facsimile versions, but so far that’s failed to happen. Obviously.) So this one is a double bargain, because I don’t have this in any form whatsoever and it’s a facsimile reprint.

Score!

But the real excitement is in this last photo:

No one who doesn’t read/collect Rex Stout can really understand the excitement of finding Rex Stout novels in a secondhand bookshop. It’s a rare and wonderful thing. I suspect that people rarely get rid of their Stouts, because they’re not like, say, Agatha Christie novels. I’m terribly fond of Christie and have devoted more than a shelf of my limited bookcases to her novels, but hers really are “whondunnits”: much of the fun is gone once you find out who the murderer is. But the whodunnit aspect is, to me, only part of the joy of Rex Stout novels: their re-readability comes from Archie and Nero and the devoted but uneasy partnership in the old brownstone.

No wonder people don’t give them away easily. And no wonder when my mother said to me, “Oooh, what did you pay for them?”, I had to say, “Do you know, I didn’t even check?”

House-cleaning strange conversation:

NICK: I found the bag that the bags go in.
ME: Good-oh. Pop it on that chair, would you? Because all the bags are on that chair, for reasons that escape me.
NICK: They escape everyone, Treena.
ME: They shouldn’t escape you, the architect of the reasons.
NICK: I think you’ve fallen into the authorial fallacy there.
ME: Don’t you “authorial fallacy” me!

Enter NICK, the hero.

NICK: Well, I have saved one of the big blue bowls from smashing.
ME: Oh, good.
NICK: Amazing reflexes. You should have seen me. I was incredible.

Tableaux.

Curtain falls.

Nick prepares for Father’s Day, for which he’d promised to do all the prep himself, since I’m marking:

ME: Can you give the bathroom benches a quick wipe over with the bathroom spray?
NICK: Already have.
ME: Really? I can’t smell the eucalyptus and mint.
NICK: Oh, I didn’t use the spray.
ME: Then what did you use?
NICK: I guess I can do that.
ME: But what did you use?!

I guess I’ll never know.

(Conversational silence.)

NICK: Ah, woman as an object of exchange in homosocial relations.
ME: Pardon?
NICK: This song. [“Jessie’s Girl,” for the record.]
ME: But she’s not an object of exchange. There’s no exchange.
NICK: I guess it’s pre-text.
ME: You know, I’m really just trying to mark, here.
NICK: Oh, sorry, babe.

(Conversational silence.)

NICK (standing up and stretching): Creaking. Creaking but not yet leaking.
ME: Pardon?
NICK: Hee.
ME: Okay, two questions. Firstly, do you often leak in the study?
NICK: No.
ME: Good. Secondly, is there a high chance that you’ll leak in the near future?
NICK: Probably not.
ME: Then why the “not yet leaking”?
NICK: It’s my way of saying I’m old but I’m not yet out of the game.
ME: You’re 33.
NICK: True.

NICK: Will you stop laughing?
ME: No. You tried to get your pants on, missed, and fell over. What’s not to laugh at?
NICK: I also hurt my finger a bit.

Down in Sydney and back up in Brisbane, I did—naturally enough—a little rummaging for secondhand books. I’ve been meaning to post on them for a while, but I became trapped in a nightmarish maelstrom of uncharged rechargeable batteries and the villains (namely me) who keep forgetting to recharge them, and then thought, “Sod it. I’m just going to use my camera phone.”

(Wasn’t that a story worth waiting for? It had everything! Fierce weather! A villainous protagonist! An unreliable narrator! Batteries!)

So the images are a little fuzzier than usual. Fuzzier, but somehow atmospheric (she tells herself hopefully).

These ones weren’t Sydney purchases at all:

Poor Bettina! I found her in a local secondhand bookshop. I only hope she hadn’t been blundering around in there too long.

And the book under Blundering Bettina is The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, which is an old volume of mine that I rescued from my parents’ house before they could send it to Lifeline. Short stories rather than a novel, it’s perhaps my favourite Pimpernel book: much more rescuing aristos from the guillotine and much less agonising about his marriage. Oh, and the assassination of Marat, without which no lazy Sunday afternoon reading is ever going to reach its full potential.

The bottom book is The Daisy Chain, one of Victorian moralist Charlotte M. Yonge’s 160 works (“chiefly novels,” adds Wikipedia blandly, as though writing 160 novels in the days when “novel” meant “no fewer than two volumes, thanks” were no mean feat).

My favourite thing about this volume is the illustrations:

In this one, the child has been accidentally poisoned (by its nurse, obviously) with opium, which I guess makes this picture some form of Victorian necro-lithography.

Then there was the Berkelouw’s haul. This year, I took more photos of the inside of Berkelouw’s than I actually bought books, but I did snag these:

One would have to have a heart of stone not to buy a book called English Dialogues of the Dead, especially when it’s subtitled “A Critical History, An Anthology, and A Checklist.” How can my bookshelves be complete without that?

And The English Common Reader may actually have caused me to exclaim, “Score!” a little too loudly for the liking of all the ladies-who-lunch browsing around me.

Then there was the rummaging in Narellan Lifeline, which was punctuated by my over-excited younger nephew (he turned four that day) saying, “Auntie Treena, spin me round on this chair!” and (after I refused on the grounds of safety) adding, “I fell off, but I’m okay!”

Goodness knows what would have happened if I had spun him.

This is the fuzziest photo of the lot . . .

. . . but rest assured, almost every title includes one or more of the following: “castle,” “bone,” “time traveller,” “haunted,” or “mountain.” The exception is the top one, and since that’s called Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, I think any mention of haunted, time-travelling, mountainous bone-castles would have been over-kill, no?

But my real joy is in the last pile:

E. Nesbit’s Tales of Terror. I’m pretty sure the scariest thing she comes up with is the protagonist finding out that he really is as middle-class as he’s always been brought up to believe.

I’m not nuts for spring cleaning, but it is a good time to take a look at the house and see what little bits and pieces could do with a sprucing up for the new season. I’m feeling more enthusiastic about spring cleaning this year, too, because we tossed an enormous pile of books and clothes thanks to a fortuitous jumble sale, so we can breathe a little more easily in the house.

(The books, for the record, were pre-stacked in a corner of the wardrobe and had been for a year, so their absence makes no difference to my sorely abused bookshelves.)

But today’s task was my armchairs:

I love almost everything about these chairs: their solidity (they’re hardwood and weigh a tonne), the scalloped backs, the little wooden feet at the front, the wide armrests, the way they slope back, and the fact that they cost me $50 for the two.

Bargain!

Of course, they cost me $50 because they need re-springing, and re-springing just isn’t on the budget. That’s why they have those European pillows shoved down under the seat cushion: it stops us from losing guests down the back of the armchair.

But the orange just isn’t doing it for me any more. And neither is the upholstery, which is the one thing I hate about these chairs.

See?

My mother says it’s fine, but I think they look like they’re crawling with veins. The upholstery also shows dirt a bit too readily, which isn’t great in sweltering summers.

Still, if re-upholstering isn’t in the budget (and it isn’t), at least I can take some preventative measures and get rid of those orange cushion covers.

Viola!

Nice warm brown cushion covers, anti-maccassars that are actually chiffon table-runners (picked up in Sydney for pennies at a bargain basement: I only wish I’d been foresighted enough to pick up another couple to make arm covers from), and my favourite cushions (which look like ex-Muppets), and already the living room looks a little brighter and a little less orange.

ME: Are you playing a Zerg character?
NICK: Well, yes.
ME: This is shameful!
NICK: What is?
ME: First you never manage to keep up an adequate supply of minerals, which, frankly, is not something I look for in a man. And now you’re a Zerg!
NICK: That needs to be a strange conversation.
ME: As though I’d share my shame with the world.

When you’ve been grass-widowed by Starcraft 2, you need to make your own fun.