WHAT I’M READING
For Meanjin.
I’ve been finding elegant ways to procrastinate this year. Several months ago, I arranged my bookshelf according to read and unread. In a particularly sociopathic gesture, I grouped the read books by colour. A surprising number of covers are bright orange, even if you discount all the popular Penguins. The unread books huddle at the top of the bookshelf, waiting to be chosen. I look around for a way to separate the two sections. The box containing my mother’s ashes fits perfectly. It marks the threshold between past and future. As the unread pile grows smaller on the shelf, the box shuffles towards the wall. One day, it will stop entirely.
There are books I’ve been lugging around for a decade. I used to work at a second-hand book store, the sort of job that people write syrupy memoirs about. It was run as a haphazard socialist co-operative. I wrote poems at the counter and read novels while pretending to alphabetise the fiction section. Old men who smelled strange would come in with piles of yellowed books, each painstakingly labelled with the abbreviated codes by which we knew them. One was called SIR. There was little else gentlemanly about him. We kept having to explain to the dealers that we were a university bookshop and, as such, nobody wanted a copy of Looking for Alibrandi. We had at least 14 copies of Looking for Alibrandi. When a non-dealer book had been on the shelves for a year without being sold or claimed, it became a shop book. We got shop books for free. I chose them out of aspiration (Teach Yourself Ancient Greek), titillation (Satyricon: a Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier) and sheer value for (no) money (Shantaram). Every time I move house, I consider donating them, but don’t. I’ll read them some day, I think. Now, I have no excuse.
Full piece online at Meanjin.