Preventing an Untimely Death of the Hands of My Hobby

Since a large number of my teaching duties have ended for the semester and I have a few clear days ahead before the assessment comes in, I decided I’d have a lovely clean house before I had to start marking.

But—and there’s always a but—since I’m not feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today, I’m looking for ways to do a bit of cleaning without having to move around too much.

I thought I’d achieve this by doing a few loads of washing, which really only requires frenetic activity every forty-five minutes or so—but then the weather greyed over.

So I settled instead on a little light organising—a phrase that always reminds me of the episode of The Goodies where they end up at the Jolly Rock Lighthouse: “I thought it said ‘a little light housekeeping!’”—and, more specifically, moving and re-shelving the 60-odd books that currently live on the bedhead.

Ever since I was woken abruptly by a hardback copy of The Vicar of Wakefield, these books have been the bane of Nick’s existence. Even my sister, whose own pile of bedside reading is only kept upright by a convenient wall, popped her head in and said, “Yep, you’re definitely going to die.”

Still, it could have been worse: The Vicar of Wakefield is not that long a book. It could have been Dickens or Tolstoy. (Well, no: it’s highly unlikely to have been Tolstoy.)

Disturbingly, though, I found I’d forgotten half the books that were up there: technically, if they’re on the bedhead, they’re supposed to be books I’m currently reading. But I’d forgotten I even owned a copy of Manon Lescaut, much less that I’d abandoned it halfway through: apparently, I don’t have a great deal of patience with sentimental, eighteenth-century French fiction.

I’d also forgotten that I owned Patricia Wrede’s Mairelon the Magician, which I don’t think I’ve even opened. I will read that, though, since I did enjoy The Enchanted Forest Chronicles and the co-authored Sorcery and Cecelia; or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot—although, true to form, I’ve bought the second volume in the latter series and not read it, and only discovered today that there’s a third book.

On the plus side, I found Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison, which I’ve been futilely looking for on my living-room shelves for three days.

There was a Philip Pullman—one of the Sally Lockheart Mysteries—that I abandoned halfway through, because I just couldn’t cope with the battering that the heroine was taking any more. Those books are brilliant—especially if you’ve just spent three years working on penny dreadfuls—but they are hard on the nerves.

A couple of the wonderful Diana Wynne Jones’s books were stacked up there, too, one of which also had a telltale bookmark halfway through. A word of advice: if you’re trying to complete your Ph.D. thesis, stay away from Archer’s Goon. The story of a man being pursued by wizards because he owes them two thousand words just hits a little too close to home.

Then there was a mysterious pile of Victorian sensation novels, which I suspect have been sitting there for three years. I know, at least, that I intended to do a course of reading sensation novels in the early stages of the Ph.D. Then the topic shifted, as topics are wont to do, but the books stayed where they were: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Armadale, and No Name; Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd; and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne—“Dead! And never called me ‘Mother’!” Or is that just the stage version?—and Lord Oakburn’s Daughters.

Still, they’re all safely rehoused now in the living room, the hallway, the spare room, and the study, along with various Anthony Trollopes, biographies of Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.

And it’s inspired me to once again pick up Erik Larson’s book about the Chicago World Fair of 1893 and the simultaneous predations of an urban serial killer—which means that maybe, sometime soon, Facebook will stop asking me if it’s true that I’m still reading it.