…both in the literal and metaphorical sense. The wonderful news is that my ear abruptly partially cleared on the way home from work today, as I was actually on my way to urgent care to have it looked at again. It’s not 100% yet; there’s still some tinnitus and a little bit of pressure, but it’s not remotely as bad as it was yesterday and the transition from one phase to the other took all of thirty seconds. Hopefully it’ll continue to improve over the next day or two; I have about five doses of my antibiotic left.
The metaphorical sense? Do I need to explain, since you presumably have eyes and can see the image at the top of this post? Because God damn if I didn’t involuntarily start to reach for my wallet the second this image appeared on my phone, only to realize that the presale doesn’t start until the end of March so I have plenty of time to talk myself into buying four books that I didn’t like by an author who I genuinely dislike just because holy shit they’re pretty.
(They actually come with two dust covers each, those above and another set that is a slightly upscaled version of the original covers. I already have all four of these damn things with the original covers, so it’ll be these.)
Don’t ask the price. The set will cost roughly $texas; Broken Binding editions are expensive. They appreciate like motherfuckers, so I could pretend that I was going to hold on to them for a year and then sell them, I suppose, but I’ve got to buy them first. Nonetheless! Daddy can do this, all day, every day, no problem. But when is it going to stop?
I know I’ve said this before– hell, I’m a million and a half words deep into this site, I’ve said everything before– but I really never thought I was going to be the person I’ve become, where the more discretionary income I have, the more shit I find to buy. This obsession with special editions of books even if I don’t like the books is just the latest Goddamn symptom.
She’s been seen by a vet and more or less given a clean bill of health; she’s had an upset tummy for basically the whole time we’ve had her, so she’s got an antibiotic and they gave her a dewormer just for safety’s sake, but she’s negative for All the Scary Things and otherwise seems to be doing fine, so we’ve been slowly and carefully introducing her to the other cats this weekend. Jonesy appears to be fine with her so long as she’s not trying to eat his tail, which is about 60% of the time, and Sushi … well, Sushi is going to take a little bit longer to adjust, I think. 🙂
Why Gideon? It was my wife’s idea, providing a pleasing symmetry since I named Jonesy and the boy named Sushi; she’s named after the Gideon in Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. The name is perhaps a bit overly grand at this point in her life (although “Giddykitty” and “Giddygirl” both roll off the tongue quite nicely) but I think she’ll grow into it. Reasons it works:
I feel like her Halloween colors insist on a spooky name. Gideon is a necromancer. Check.
Gideon is also a redhead. Check.
Gideon spends the entirety of her book wearing skull face paint. That prominent blaze on her face doesn’t really resemble a skull at all, but I feel like connecting a cat with prominent facial markings and a character who wears face paint works. Check.
In other news, my memory is clearly going and I’ll be a shell of a man in a couple of years. I have nearly a thousand books on my Goodreads “read” shelf, which I’ve only been maintaining since 2016, so estimating that I own in the neighborhood of 2500-3000 or so books is probably not an exaggeration. I need you to understand that I’m also not exaggerating when I tell you I can find most of them in no time at all. Like, I know what books I have and I know where they are. This is not something I screw up.
It was pointed out to me recently that Brandon Sanderson is from Utah, which is a state that I don’t have an author from yet. I used to be a big fan of Sanderson’s, but at some point I grew weary of him, and I haven’t read any of his books in forever, but I figured since the guy writes 20 books a year finding something new wouldn’t be that hard. The boy wanted to go to Barnes and Noble today, so I figured I’d just grab something. I even had a book in mind; he wrote a sequel trilogy to his Mistborn series some time ago and I never read it just because it came out after I’d entered my Over Sanderson period.
(To be clear, I don’t have anything really negative to say about the guy; I don’t have any evidence that he’s, like, a bad person or anything, but his books started getting really samey after a while and I bailed on him after noticing the serious problem with white savior complex that his Stormlight Archives series had. It’s not like a personal vendetta or anything.)
Anyway, I found the first book of the second Mistborn series, called The Alloy of Law, and grabbed a Jorge Luis Borges book (Argentina!) along with it for shits and giggles.
On the way out of the store, my wife says “Don’t you have that one already?” to me.
“No,” I said, “I never picked up the second series.” And then I proceeded to torture myself about it the entire way home. Whereupon I found out that I did have the damn thing already, and not even in a different edition that would have given me an excuse. I hadn’t finished the series, but I had started it. And, y’all, I don’t make that mistake, and I’m vastly irritated with myself.
I mean, I know it’s a solvable problem, because I just go back and swap it for another book, but … shit.
Mei-Mei asked in comments to the last post what I do with all of my books after I’m done reading, and it occurs to me that I don’t actually think I’ve done this post yet, somehow. Let’s take a tour of my house! Without cleaning it first, because … I really should have straightened the place up first. Oh well.
Also, yes, we only have one child.
We begin in “the back” of the house, the room that we have never really settled on a name for. This is technically a CD/DVD rack, and these are all paperbacks, and it needs dusting quite badly.
Same room, on the other side of the sliding glass door to the back porch.
Opposite wall, with Star Wars hardcovers, general fiction, comic books, Stephen King, and Brandon Sanderson, and also featuring my telescope and the boy’s home-made robot costume.
On to the living room!
Getting a good angle on this bookshelf is kind of tricky because of where it’s located. That top shelf will never contain books as it’s where I throw my wallet and my keys and various and sundry things I need to keep track of. The rest of it is basically all black history.
To the right behind the lamp is not a smaller bookshelf; that’s actually a piano.
These four bookshelves are on the wall behind the one you just saw, and are part of the reason it’s kind of tricky to get a good shot of that bookshelf. Subjects include religion, presidential history (the third shelf, left to right, the one with Thor and Hawkeye on top, has at least one book by or about every legitimately elected President of the United States, plus my Lincoln shelf,) education, and history and philosophy of science.
The next few pictures are all on the same wall, opposite this one:
Mostly fiction, with some history scattered here and there, especially on that very top part, along with comic books and role-playing games.
My leatherbounds and two shelves of mostly nonfiction, although the books that are stacked in front and not properly on the shelves are more likely to be fiction than not.
To the right of the TV, entirely fiction, plus the top shelf of Books By Me And People I Know. Also some overflow from the black history shelf.
On to the bedroom!
Fiction, a couple of shelves of my wife’s books, and yearbooks and photo albums. Top left is the (empty!!!!) unread shelf; note that the four books on the unread shelf are not part of the unread shelf. Two are ARCs that are due for a review in July sometime and so don’t count yet and two are eventually going to be moved to the People I Know/Indie Authors shelf and I just haven’t gotten around to it for some reason. Also, a litterbox.
In the office are several boxes full of my own books for whenever I’m able to go to a con again and exactly two shelves, one of hardback Star Wars books and one of generic fiction hardcovers that I didn’t have a better place to put. The shelf itself is in a corner and buried behind a bunch of stuff so I didn’t bother getting a picture of it.
Also, back in January I took, I think, six banker’s boxes of books into the basement, with the understanding that if by January of 2021 I hadn’t found a reason to go looking through them, I was going to donate them to someone. So this would have had probably another 100-120 books scattered throughout if I hadn’t done that.
I think I’ll spend my whole weekend cleaning now.
6:06 PM, Friday, June 12: 2,039,468 confirmed cases and 114,446 Americans dead. I keep almost doing a much more comprehensive “this is not going away” type of post with these numbers; perhaps I’ll do that this weekend, in between dusting every surface in the house.
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