Terrible pictures of beautiful pictures

The Leeper Park Art Fair was this weekend, and I’ve been waiting a literal year to go buy something printed on metal from Josh Merrill, and we went and did that this morning. And, damn it, this looks gorgeous in person, and I was excited enough about it that I got it hung the same day we bought it, which qualifies as a minor miracle. So naturally now, because I’m a schmuck, looking at my picture of it all I can see is that damn smoke alarm and that it looks too small over the couch.

In person, not the case. That’s a 20″ x 40″ print, and in person it doesn’t look that small. Also, and in general, prints on metal don’t seem to photograph well; the colors glow in a way that I find completely entrancing in person, and I love this piece. That said, instead of fighting with glare and such to take another picture from my phone, here’s the piece, entitled “New Day,” taken from his website:

In case you didn’t click on the link, that picture is taken inside of an ice cave somewhere in northern Minnesota and it was seventeen below zero outside at the time. Josh is a lunatic, y’all.

Monthly Reads: May 2024

Book of the Month is going to be Salman Rushdie’s Knife.

Unread Shelf: May 31, 2024

Three of those are Volume One of finished trilogies. Three of them are either one-shots or Volume Ones when Volume Two isn’t out yet, and I got as pre-orders. So progress is being made even if that technically could be twelve books and not six.

Also, this:

The Tchaikovsky, at the very least, is going down in June. The Robin Hobb books are being saved for last, mostly because I know there are twelve more after those three if I get hooked and I’m terrified.

Monthly Reads: April 2024

On one hand, this picture is slightly misleading, because I’m only about 50 pages into The Will of the Many and it’s a doorstop. On the other hand, I also read Laura Samotin’s The Sins on Their Bones and it’s not in the picture because it’s an ebook. So we’ll call it even.

Book of the Month is me having a stroke because I have no idea what the Book of the Month should be. This was a great set of books.

Unread Shelf: April 30, 2024

My goal is to have every book on this shelf that isn’t part one of a finished series read by the end of this month.

Additional hotness of the new variety

If you’ve been around here for any length of time– five days would do it– you have certainly seen at least a variant of this picture, my four Nice Bookshelves that are in my living room and are currently dedicated at least mostly to series fiction. The bottom shelves are an exception, partially, but whatever.

A few weeks ago I discovered what I thought was a spectacular sale at the furniture store I worked at– not quite, but almost, half off of these exact same bookshelves. So this has happened:

Hello, Gideon. Hello, The Boy’s toes.

So we’re back to having seven bookshelves in this room again, which I … think is probably the end of it, because of the extra room the sectional takes up compared to the sofa we had before? But who knows. At any rate, these are not precisely identical to the bookshelves we had before, because they weren’t on sale– these come unassembled, and that’s why they were cheaper. That rather tedious process has been my job for the last few days. That said, once put together, they look identical, and they’re quite solidly put together as well– these are absolutely not Wal-Mart $40 specials like the other bookshelves in the house and I have no reason to not believe they’ll last just as long as the ones we spent more money on.

We used my wife’s nice big new car to deliver a shitton of styrofoam and cardboard to our local recycling/hazardous waste facility today and I’ve got all the shelves where I want them. I have two days of vacation left and by the time school starts back up I want my books organized properly again. Right now the theme is “only fiction in the living room” and “only nonfiction in the library … other than the leatherbounds,” but we’ll see.

I’ll post more pictures once everything is properly organized.

Monthly Reads: March 2024

Book of the Month is Pierce Brown’s Dark Age, although I could probably just say “The second Red Rising trilogy” and be done with it. Also, this is clearly an entire shelf of books all by itself and how the hell are there still so many unread books.

Unread Shelf: March 31, 2024

Yeah, okay, that looks like a lot, and I’ve broken my vow by ordering both volumes of Shōgun, but have you seen … my other unread books?

I made significant progress this month, I swear I did, but hell if it looks like it.