Ten Little Chances to be Free

Took some of my dad's hardcovers off his hands today--thaaaat's another two or three more shelves, mostly nonfiction, about half WWII history. Lots of cryptography and espionage stuff. Dad thinks I'm going to end up working for the NSA.

Speaking of which, where the fuck is my copy of Cryptonomicon? I swear to god that all my Neal Stephenson novels disappear sooner or later. My brother borrowed Snow Crash and never gave it back, my dad borrowed Diamond Age and only just gave it back in the giant bookdump, mmejavert borrowed the Baroque Cycle and will hopefully give it back but it takes six months to read the damn thing, and now Cryptonomicon is missing. Granted, I am rather evangelical about lending out my Neal Stephenson, but that is because Neal Stephenson is awesome and writes geekfic on steroids, and I want my books back so I can pimp them out to more people. (Kind of like Mark Steel--I swear I ought to have a reading copy and a lending copy of Vive la Révolution.)

Now I just need to decide what to read next.

Bookshelves are here! And, um, after dragging an extra folding bookcase up from the basement, I think I might have room for everything. All the books (except the Illustrated Classics). All my non-book crap too. Of course, I haven't even opened the four or five banker's boxes full of miscellaneous crap taken from my room at dad's house, but most of that will probably end up in storage or given away.

Mostly done organizing. I just need to find a home for some miscellaneous paperbacks, go through old school papers, and consolidate my pile of duplicates and books I want to get rid of. I've even got a bit of empty shelf space, though god knows how long it will last once I start going through the banker's boxes.

Anyway, it is so wretchedly hot outside that the air conditioning is barely reaching my room and my computer is overheating, which is probably a sign that I should go downstairs and read the new Temeraire book.

Apropos of absolutely NOTHING, the Hyperbole and a Half blog is amazing and the This Is Why I'll Never Be Adult strip is the first thing in years that has made me cry with laughter. Literally. As in laugh until there were tears pouring out of my eyes.

Anyway, nobody kill me but... there are more books in my future. First mmejavert and I did a book swap, which ended up pretty equal on both sides (she lent me more, but I lent her all my 900-page Neal Stephenson novels, so...) Then we went to the Second Story Books warehouse. Then, over dinner, my dad informed me that the house he's moving into has no built-in bookshelves and he really has no idea what to do with everything except the sci-fi paperbacks he already gave me, and would I be interested in taking some of his military history books off his hands?

Face, meet desk.

I'm not sure whether I have room for a giant box of hardcovers, but like hell am I going to refuse books on Trafalgar, or the gorgeous edition of Churchill's seven-volume history of WWII. If necessary I will resort to my current gravity-based horizontal book storage system, aka stacks of shit on the floor, in order to make room for the Churchill, which I always ogled as a child without ever daring to touch the Really Fancy Books That Belong To Dad.

And surprisingly, I didn't get much at Second Story. George Sand's autobiography (in English), Vigny's "Chatterton" (in French), and two Aubrey-Maturin books. Last time I went they had a giant shelf of POB, and the ten or eleven books in the series I already have come from raiding Second Story's POB supply wholesale and getting a bulk discount, but this time they only had two that I didn't already own, and only five or six total. I asked at the desk what happened to their giant POB supply. "Oh," said the employee, "funny thing, we used to have a whole collection of them, but there were these two people who completely bought us out." I must have been one of them, haha.

Movers are coming tomorrow with the bookshelves. There will probably be room for everything. Probably. If I ignore the giant double stack of Great Illustrated Classics.

Finally getting around to reading all the trashy vampire lit I should probably have read when I was fourteen. On the plus side, being twenty-two means I can down chartreuse while reading Lost Souls. But I'm sure it would all have resonated so much more deeply when I was in high school and being weird and different meant, by definition, rebellion. Maybe it will resonate more deeply once I enter the workforce and discover the world of soulless fluorescent lights and office dress codes. But now it is firmly in the realm of fun and silly and oh god she is writing about my suburb isn't she. (Except she wasn't, because unless I was running with the wrong crowd, or unless a lot changed in the ten years between When The Book Is Set and When I Was In High School, the teenage misfits at my school didn't have half as much sex as in the book. Seriously, I'm jealous.)

Have also come to the depressing realization that my generation is probably the last one to have a mostly-analog childhood. I mean, the computer was there, but it was one more toy in the toybox, and only got booted up when I was bored with Legos and wanted to play Doom. It wasn't a sucking all-consuming center of attention. I'm sure my childhood would have been very different if I could have Googled things instead of looking them up in books, or if I'd been able to kill lazy afternoons online instead of curled up with a novel.

I think I'm going to return to the no-computer-before-dinner policy I tried to adopt during the semester, because the internet has seriously shredded my attention span and I'd like to get it back a little. Not that this is related to the preceding paragraph or anything. And not that I'm freaking out because this is my last summer vacation before I enter the real world or anything.

Fortunately my dad, who's moving out of his house this summer, has offered me as many bookshelves from the house as I want. I think only two will fit in my room, but one of them is a six-foot-tall glass-doored affair that should be able to hold plenty of books.

In the meantime...

( My bookshelf )

( Piles of books! )

Currently reading 1830: Le Peuple de Paris: Révolution et représentations sociales. It is incredibly shiny. It's an examination of, not only the role of the working classes in the July Revolution, but images and representations of The People and their place (real and perceived) in society--just before, during, and just after July, so about 1825-1831 with a special emphasis on 1830. There's a heavy emphasis on primary sources rather than academic infighting, which means my wish list of "stuff I would jump on if the Bibliothèque Nationale weren't a bunch of elitist dickwads" is growing exponentially. And the author dives straight into the question of "what does 'people' mean, exactly?" Is it the entire population of a country? If we're narrowing it down to the "popular," i.e. working classes, are we talking everyone or just the ones in abject misery? And from there it jumps straight into the divide between the Faubourg Saint-Antoine (the traditional, 'honest' working class neighborhood) and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel (abject misery, on the margins of society), or at least the perceived divide, because there's a bunch of stuff about the economic crisis that lasted from 1827 to 1832 and how it drove the working classes into a more marginal position. There are useful and scary facts and figures: at the end of the Restoration, the average worker's wage was about 1.5 francs a day. In the early 1820s bread was at about 60 centimes for a four-pound loaf; around 1829 or 1830 it was at 90+ centimes. Assuming a family to support, that's two-thirds of your daily wages going to bread.

Sources being used include the usual press stuff, caricatures, "studies" of Parisian life, etc., but also police reports (with a few grains of salt), popular songs, and theatre.

In conclusion, this book is awesome. And I'm like 40 pages into it.

Couldn't sleep last night, so stayed up until five in the morning reading Splendeurs et Misères. Finished part 2 ("A combien l'amour revient aux vieillards"), started part 3 ("Où mènent les mauvais chemins"), should not be this desperate for fic. Also should not be looking for fic when I haven't even finished the damn book. Also should probably be ashamed of myself since by "fic" I mean "porn," but it explains why I want fic before I've even finished the book--I know that what I want to read will never be in the book even though it's 95% canon. (Yes, 95%. I mean, I'm sure there are academics who've tried to preserve the purity of the literary canon and insist that Vautrin wasn't fucking Lucien senseless, but unless there is some serious "no it is not gay it is a PURE and SPIRITUAL pact with the devil, who coincidentally has a taste for pretty young men" backpedaling in the second half, they don't have much of a leg to stand on.)

Funny that the id!fic meme is going around fandom right now, because this is a perfect example. Ordinarily I would not stay up until five in the morning reading Balzac. All the other Balzac I've read so far is the literary equivalent of eating vegetables--the kind of literature that's good for you, you can appreciate it a lot better now than when you were a kid and it was being shoved down your throat, but you're not going to plonk yourself down at the table and devour your whole stash the day before your period. But suddenly along comes Vautrin and his beautifully fucked-up relationship with Lucien and I am getting sucked into the swirling id vortex. And the rest of it is still squarely in the category of "interesting and observant and the execution is brilliant, but I am not particularly touched by it."

And just when I thought I could read in French without much difficulty, along comes Balzac's ridiculous transcription of Nucingen's German(?) accent. What the FUCK is that, seriously.

17 days, 11 cities, 6 night trains, 5 youth hostels, 1 hangover, and god knows how many fragmented multilingual converstions later, I am back in Paris!

And procrastinating merrily on the giant pile of work I have to do.

Because obviously when you have a midterm and a paper due the next day, two semester projects due within a week or so, at least one exam you are woefully unprepared for, and a big ol' heap of plans and activities to manage, the thing to do is buy books.

See, I wandered onto Amazon intending ONLY to buy "Paris au temps de Balzac," which I have been coveting for seven or eight months now. But I have a gift card to burn on the American Amazon, and free shipping to take advantave of on the French Amazon. So I ended up with Paris au temps de Balzac, Rimbaud's complete works, Verlaine's gay porn, Melmoth the Wanderer, a collection of Le Fanu stories, Polidori's The Vampyre, Poppy Z Brite's Lost Souls, the first Comte de Saint-Germain novel, the first three Hornblower books, Perdido Street Station, The Difference Engine, The Anubis Gates, and The Stress of Her Regard.

....not that I had a sudden craving for steampunk or trashy gothic novels or anything!

Most of these are getting shipped to my house in the US, so I don't have to worry about cramming them into my suitcase come June. XD Every time I go on one of these book-buying binges I think of my grandfather; he upbraids me whenever I express guilt over buying waaaaay more books than I can read in the foreseeable future, and sternly tells me I'm starting a library and this is a GOOD thing.


EDIT: Okay, the gift card is officially used up, and the shipments making their way to my door in America now also include box sets of the Dark is Rising sequence and Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Once and Future King, Maurice, a collection of gothic tales by Elizabeth Gaskell, and--god help me--an ink-and-paper copy of the Pearl. Because Victorian smut is entertaining.

Yes, I do pretty much plan to spend this summer reading in a hammock, why do you ask?

Oh god, why can I never stop myself from buying books? Even when I have every reason not to? My German has gone to shit and I'm going to be lugging two hardcovers around for another two weeks, and yet I couldn't resist, so now I have a collection of Heine's poetry and a book of Germanic myths and legends. My extremely flimsy justification is that it will improve my German. (Which is what the bilingual edition of Faust was supposed to be for, but I guess that's like trying to teach yourself English using Shakespeare, and might be a biiiit beyond my capacity.)

After a day in Salzburg I'm starting to find the rococo-ness of it all rather oppressive, really, so I'm much looking forward to Neuschwanstein tomorrow and then Slovenia the day after. I did go to the Mozart house museum thing, which was rather nice, and managed to eavesdrop on a school group getting a guided tour. My German is definitely coming back to me, passively--I can read and understand well enough, but whenever I try to speak the words come out in French.

Hence my (flimsy) justification for buying books. I must practice my German!

I was really, seriously ogling the German translation of Lord of the Rings, because it was a beautiful edition and as far as I could tell a beautiful translation, but it was also €40 and therefore a bit out of my book-buying budget. And HEAVY. Maybe I'll get it online or something.

I just finished the 1300-page monster known as The Mysteries of Paris. I've already written about how it relates to Les Mis, and I treated Fleur-de-Marie and her Victorian novel disease rather flippantly then, but the end of the novel centers around her and I ended up really liking her. TVTropes would probably have a field day with her, but she is fundamentally a subversion of a trope that's dear to a lot of people's hearts: the long-lost princess rescue fantasy.

( SPOILERY SPOILERS AHEAD )