A look at bookshelves.

Right!

When I started this blog, this first picture shows where most of my books were hanging out at. A three-shelver in the spare bedroom at my parent's place, which is where it still stands.



But after that photo was taken, I've moved twice, and now have a nice, large black bookshelf with lots of space for new books and comics.

It's been about five months since I got that one, and every time I've gone to see the parents, I've dragged back a big backpack full of books. My back is so not grateful for this. But the 'fun' thing is... take a look at picture #2 here:



Can you see the huuuuuuge hole I've made in five months of dragging books hundreds of miles across snowy Finland? Can you? CAN YOU? I SURE CAN'T!

*sob*

Ok, the two high piles on the left have been reduced to one tiny pile, but part of the original piles are now on top of the shelf. And there's no more piles on top of the books on the shelves, either. Just a couple of random books. But there's still two rows of paperbacks on the middle shelf.

Hopeless.

I just attempted taking photos of the new, black shelf, but it's already too dark for photo-taking, and my camera decided that it really means it this time when it says it's out of batteries. So no using the lightning, either. Next time. But it's like this:


...so there's room for books and stuff on BOTH sides. It's maybe 2/5 full now. Lots of room left.

Byzantium Endures

Title: Byzantium Endures
Author: Michael Moorcock
Published: 1994 by Phoenix Paperbacks, originally in 1981 (?)
Genre: Historical fiction
Pages: 404


Hoo boy, and that was just the first of four! I bought this book for £ 2,50 from a used book store in Notting Hill, London, back in 2003. And it took me this long to finally read it. Now, I have the rest of the series as well (The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands and The Vengeance of Rome (well ok, the last one is still in the mail, I should have it next week!)), which all together tell the story of Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski. A man so full of himself -and cocaine- I'm expecting him to explode by book 3.

Seriously, though. For the first 40, 50 pages I was thinking that if something doesn't happen soon in this book, it's going back on the shelf. But then, around page 60, I was properly sucked in. So properly, into the mind of a narcissistic, charming genius that again, I ended up reading his story and more or less mad rantings long into the night. It was like... a holiday. In someone else. Not a nice someone, but someone I found myself at times sympathizing with or even pitying. Or just disgusted by him.

Pyat was born on the 1st January 1900 in Kiev, Ukraine, a fatherless child, apparent genius. I say apparent, since I'm not convinced he actually is one, rather than a very convincing and lucky bastard. Relatives, looking to mould him for their own uses, pay for his education. Byzantium Endures takes the reader from Kiev to Odessa's warmth, to St. Petersburg just before the October Revolution, and all around Ukraine during the Civil War. History is seen though his eyes, and thankfully, at least for me, he doesn't give a rat's patootie about politics. As a guest star we get to meet a young Mrs. Cornelius in this adventure of the first twenty years of Pyat's life.

And there indeed is three more bricks of his story. Ooh. But I think I need a holiday from this holiday with some lighter reading before I crack open the next volume.


"I think we have heard all we need, Kryscheff!*"

"I have hardly begun." I said calmly. "There is much more."


*Kryscheff is the name Pyat had to use while a student in St. Petersburg.

Meme time!

01. Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

Chocolate all the way. For a snack. But at work, I read while eating my lunch. My lunch, however, consists of yogurt and a müsli bar.

02. Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

If I do mark anything, it’s only with pencil. Last time was when I was reading the biography of Rufus Wainwright last year. I can’t remember what it was, though. Before that, it must have been at school. So no, I don’t tend to do that.

03. How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

Bookmarks mostly. Dog-ears is acceptable only in an emergency. And there’s usually no such hurry anywhere that there’s no chance to find a scrap of paper.

For the last two years I had these calendar-bookmarks, one for each month, and I’d write in the back what books I’d read that month. But I couldn’t find one this year, so it’s back to little pictures and such.

04. Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?

Both, but I prefer fiction.

05. Hardcopy or audiobooks?

Yes. I love the feeling of having a book in my hands, and going at it at my own pace, with the option to stop and think of what I’ve read whenever I want. But it’s also really nice to listen to a book while drawing, walking or sitting in a bus. My current project is to listen through all the Harry Potter audiobooks, read by Stephen Fry, before the last movie comes out. Just finished Prisoner of Azkaban, so, looking good!

06. Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

I prefer to read until the end of a chapter, or at least to a break after a paragraph. Like with drawing and especially writing, I don’t much appreciate being interrupted while reading.

07. If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? Write it down to look it up later? Just try to infer what it means from the rest of the sentence, and keep going?

Mostly I just try to figure out what it might mean in the context, and then look it up later. If I remember to. Usually I don’t remember.

08. What are you currently reading?

Ohh… Tokyo Babylon by CLAMP, Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock, and some Harry Potter audio books.

09. What is the last book you bought?

I just bought four used books last Monday, let’s see… Tokio ei välitä meistä enää by Ray Loriga, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, The Bedroom Secrets Of The Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh, and Tom of Finland by Arell & Mustola.

10. Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can read more than one at a time?

I guess I answered that in question # 08. But there are times when I’m reading only one at a time.

11. Do you like re-reading books?

Oh fuck yes. I do it all the time. Same with movies. The only problem is, the pile of Books To Read For The First Time is yea high. The pile of Books To Re-read is higher. So, not enough time to re-read as many of them as many times as I’d like.

The Secret Tunnel

Title: The Secret Tunnel
Author: James Lear
Published: 2008 by Cleis Press
Genre: Murder, mystery and mansex.
Pages: 298


Sequel to the first book I ever wrote about on this blog, The Back Passage! (the last of the Mitch Mitchell Mysteries is called A Sticky End. Hee hee) Mitch is on his way from Edinburgh to London on the Flying Scotsman, a non-stop train service, in this humorous murder mystery in the spirit of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. In London awaits his old flame, Harry 'Boy' Morgan, whose daughter's godfather Mitch is to be. But it's a loooooong way from Edinburgh to London, with many, many buggerable arses on the way. The train is loaded with diamond merchants, movie stars, old dowagers and their companions, and of course a stowaway and a nasty murder. And men in kilts.

I really like how the stowaway-come-Watson to Mitchell's Sherlock is described on the back of the book as 'Belgian power bottom Bertrand'. And it greatly amuses me that one of the characters is named Peter Dickinson. I see what you did there, Mr. Lear. Oh, and I have to quote this bit on the back as well: "This isn't porn accompanied by a wah-wah guitar, this is porn to the strains of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, each vividly realised ejaculation accompanied by a fanfare and the crashing of cymbals." (-TIME OUT)

Like the first one, this was pretty darn sexy, fun, and real hard to put down. I just want you to know that I'm trying really hard not to make a dick-joke out of that. I read most of it in two sittings, mostly at home, because a) it was that hard to put down, and b) ...I really didn't want to explain to most work colleagues at lunch why I'm reading a book with a naked man on the cover. Who looks very much like Robert Downey Jr. to me. Heh. My only problem with this book was the few typos that had slipped in, most of them just typos, but once there was a misplaced name, too. I know I'm nitpicking, but typos can really turn me off. (I've angsted long into the night over typos I've made myself...) I bought the third, and last? of the Mitch Mitchell mysteries as well, but I think I'm gonna keep that on the shelf for now, save it for a rainy day. Because, man, these books will pick you up like Prozac.


The waiter brought our lunch, and we were obliged to change the subject.
"So today, my friend, we must give you some time to recover before, no doubt, you spend another night with your legs in the air in the Regal Hotel."
"Not always. He likes me to sit on it and slide down-"
"And we must pay some visits. Let us try, Bertrand, to keep our minds off sex, at least for the next few hours."


*snerk* Yeah, good luck with that!

Kitchen

Title: Kitchen
Author: Banana Yoshimoto
Published: 2001, but 1993 in English for the first time, and 1988 in Japanese.
Genre: Sad love song
Pages: 150


I just finished this, so I'm still a little wahh. Sniffle. First time I read Kitchen was years ago, and in Finnish. But it kept haunting me, even if just a little. And last xmas I got it! Yay. So I got to read it again.

Kitchen includes two short-shortish stories about death and love. Especially the latter one is good for crying, which is why I finished it now at home, and not at work. First one tells of a young woman who, orphaned as a child, has now just lost her only living relative left, her grandmother. A boy she hardly knows asks her to come and live with him and his eccentric mother. The book gets its title from this story's main character's love for a good kitchen. The second one, named Moonlight Shadow after the Mike Oldfield song is about a young girl who has just lost her first love, and then happens to meet a woman who promises to show her something special.

I don't usually read love stories. Well, okay, I do every now and then, but I prefer it when they're just a part of a bigger picture. But this was pure sad love. Pretty and short and sad and sweet and all that. Haunting and a little extraordinary.


"We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it's more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did - but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don't mean this in the fatalistic sense; we're constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Ah, but the moon was lovely.

"I stood up and knocked on Yuichi's window."


Apparently, there's a movie of Kitchen. I may have to look for this...