Journal
Bookshelves
The internet is full of gloriously sexy photographs of beautiful, artfully messy bookshelves. This is not one of them.
PeterMBall
07/06/2013
Tag: bookshelves
Journal
Why do you get a random photo of bookshelves, you ask?
So I finally got around to uploading the WordPress app onto my android, allowing me to update the blog remotely using my dodgy smartphone keyboard and a 3g connection. Somehow I doubt this will be massively life changing, although it does seem to be a faster way of uploading photos to the site. Not good photos, mind, nor photos of anything interesting for the moment, but its an option that may come in handy eventually.
PeterMBall
14/02/2012
Journal
The Great Bookshelf Reorganising of 2011
On Saturday night, around 4 am, I started reorganising bookshelves. It seemed like the thing to do, since I’d been studiously not-sleeping for five hours after going to bed. Bookcases are one of the places where mess accumulates in my flat, largely because there’s so many of the damn things and I’ve developed a bad habit of taking things down, reading a couple of paragraphs, then putting them back somewhere else. What starts as a workable system quickly devolves over time, and every couple of years I have to start from scratch and reorganize the entire system. The whole process tends to start around 4 AM, ’cause insomnia is my response to doing to much and thinking too much and generally feeling like things are out of control. Reordering shelves is my way of figuring out what is and isn’t important in my life, and everything goes on from there. It’s a mental reset, fighting back against my natural tendency towards entropy. So far
PeterMBall
28/02/2011
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption
Stacking Books in Piles
It seemed like a slightly manic goal when I set it back in July of last year, but my question to read 104 books in the space of a year may actually work out. I finished Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own this morning, which brought my reading total up to 74 books, then put together the final thirty books I’m planning on finishing between now and July 31st. They now live on my bedside table, a pile of words that can be beaten down day by day until I finally clear the whole damn thing. To make the goal I need to clear three books off this pile a week, which is a little less daunting than it should be because of my bad habit of reading half a book and getting distracted (and cherry picking stories out of anthologies and collections). There’s a lot of bookmarks already in that pile, which should cut the reading time down
PeterMBall
17/04/2010
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking
205
For those who may be wondering, allow me to clarify what exactly it is you’re looking at in the accompanying photograph. That, my dear peeps, is a photograph of victory in action. Or a pile of 205 books that are ready to leave my house forever and never return, thus clearing shelf-space and giving me tacit permission to buy new books should I ever find myself in possession of discretionary cash ever gain. The problem, at this point, is that I have no idea how I’m going to get many of these books out of the house. Some I suspect will be claimed by friends (particularly the gaming material and fantasy books) and I expect the rest will go to charity of some kind, although the logistics of carting a box of this size to a salvo bit could be a bit of a problem. Still, the cull is done, and when I originally wrote “get rid of 200 books”
PeterMBall
21/11/2009
