etc.

Email I received transcribed verbatim (by permission; identity withheld by request; moniker added also by request):

And here’s my response, also verbatim:

• Charlie’s Angles
• Home Despot
• Congestion Charge in London (the official website has been down all morning).

I realise now that the attempt to read everything I own before exploring further afield will not work. Having tried for the past few weeks, I’ve come to believe that it is an artificial way to approach selection because so much of what I choose to read depends upon things like recommendations, reviews, having something new catch my eye, etc.. The act of choosing your next book should be a more organic experience, and while the exercise of making a list of unread books has proven to be somewhat therapeutic, I’ve started to feel confined by the boundaries of that list. So having released myself from the shackles, I can outwardly proclaim that it is never a bad idea to have a few unread books lying around, and sometimes a nice stack of them can make the perfect coffee table.

When I graduated last year and started working where I am now, I was relieved to be out of academia and anxious for a little cerebral decompression. I now feel sufficiently decompressed and find that I am starting to miss being academically stimulated, and while I search for a longer term solution, reading research blogs has provided some fulfillment. As far as the longer term solution goes, I plan to ease myself back into the groove with a French class in the Fall as well as start putting some serious thought and work into the library-related research ideas that have been percolating in my brain for a few months.

Things like this make logophiles like me very, very happy. Welcome to my world: be careful what you say, but more importantly, be careful how you say it.

I woke up yesterday with that last-day-of-the-weekend uneasiness, knowing that there were all sorts of chores to be done, but feeling like doing nothing more than curling up with my book and a cup of tea. My early morning restlessness was compounded by the fact that when I went into the laundry room with my first of five loads, someone had beat me to it. Never mind, it was free in an hour and I set about the laundry task preoccupied, dreaming of earl grey and Proust.

MJ had already pulled out the card table by this time and had started working for the day, taking one 30 minute break at about 3pm to fetch some suitable Super Bowl Sunday food. Just about 7pm, he started on the guacamole, and I headed in for a shower and right in the middle of browning the beef and rinsing shampoo, the power dies. And then a few seconds after the absolute darkness hit, the lights in the washroom flickered back to about 30% of normal brightness. We live in a very old house, so we are fairly used to tripping fuses and learned some time ago that the hair dryer and toaster oven should never be operated at the same time, even though toasting my English muffin while my hair dries is my idea of effective multitasking. But when we checked all the fuse boxes this time (there are about 6), none of the switches had been tripped, and then the quirks: if we turned the dryer off, the lights in the laundry room and all power in our kitchen would go; if we tried to operate the washer and dryer, all lights would go, but all other non-light electricals would work. And no matter what we tried, we couldn’t get any power to the stove (hence our browning beef was sitting, partially-cooked, in a tepid pool of its own juice), and all our lights were burning at no more than 30%.

The landlord was not home, and we knew enough to know that even if he was, he’d probably have to be either an electrician or a priest to fix the problem, so we moved appliances to operational electrical outlets, cooked the rest of the beef in the microwave, baked the nachos in the toaster oven, lit some candles, and made the best of it. Meanwhile, one damp load of laundry awaits in the dryer, while a load of towels is soaking in some cold water in the washing machine, and since the baseboard heaters aren’t getting any power, our cats are huddling for warmth on the blankets we placed by the radiator on this -30°C day.

I woke up this morning, made myself a cup of tea, slipped in an Edith Piaf CD and settled into reading this lovely little book. While it is sometimes difficult to distinguish your enjoyment of a particular book from the expericence of reading it, I’d have to say this is the kind of book that I would have enjoyed even on a rushed commute. White writes Paris so intimately and passionately, and that intimacy and passion is heightened by the fact that his partner, Hubert Sorin, illustrated White’s anecdotal sketches of Paris with old-fashioned, caricatures of the characters that people this work, from their exhuberant concierge, to the Parisian street singers and grocers. White’s memories of Paris centre around their friends and acquaintances, and there is a whole lot of literary name-dropping in many of the comical episodes here, but there is also an underlying sadness to this book because the task of completing the work was constrained by the limitations of Sorin’s illness – he was dying of AIDS as he worked to complete his illustrations. Without White’s tender Afterword, the book might have seemed a pointless patchwork of disjointed narratives, but it manages to put the rest of the work in context and celebrates the impact on his life of both a remarkable man and a remarkable city.

It has been very cold in Toronto for a very long time. We’ve had temperatures as cold as -20° C for weeks, and that’s not saying anything about the wind chill. And the copious amounts of snow that fell in December are still with us, not in brown, icy clumps, but in white, frozen drifs, everywhere. And while it has been bright and sunny for most of the past two weeks, the 7 minute walk to my car at the end of the day has been tear-filled, ear-burning, and extremity-numbing. I usually like winter: the warm oversized clothes, socks in bed, the joy of constraining your cat in your lap for hours for the sheer pleasure of the heat. But it’s only January and I am already dreaming of Birkenstock weather.

This is a month of milestone birthdays for my family. My grandma turned 80 nine days ago, and my sister turns 30 today. That whole thing about not being able to choose your family gets me because I feel quite fortunate in knowing that I would actually choose every one of them everytime. Happy 30th birthday Ab!

I’ve been on a bit of a redesign bender over the past few days, playing with colour schemes, images, logos and typefacing. I would do this stuff for a living if I didn’t love what I already do so much. Most recently, Bibliolatry has been retooled, so for those of you who enter and exit at this page, go over and have a gander while you’re here. I’m quite proud of the outcome.

If his first one wasn’t enough to convince me that I really should be reading more of these book-related whodunits, then this book has certainly done it. The Bookman’s Wake is John Dunning’s sequel to Booked to Die, starring Cliff Janeway, the infinitely likeable Denver cop turned book dealer. This one follows the story of the Grayson brothers, who established Grayson Press, a small-press publishing company specialising in carefully crafted, limited runs of classic texts. I enjoyed this one better than the first, probably because Janeway wastes no time in the business of being a cop and focuses all his attention instead on the business of books. The novel is chockfull of interesting antiquarian book trade facts and if last-page-disappointment is any indication of how good a novel is, then this one is a definite winner.

Bloggie nominees have been announced, so go over and vote if you are so inclined. These are the folks who are actually becoming famous because of their blogs, unlike the rest of us who only delude ourselves into thinking that more than 10 comments a week means that the world is right here, and yes, it is listening dammit. Once you have read the nominees, you also might be encouraged to ask: will the Anti-Bloggies be the same this year, now that one of the awards’ brainmasters has been nominated for a Bloggie himself?