![]() ![]() Midnight’s Children is only kept together by several thick rubber bands, Wind in the Willows and Collected Short Stories by Somerset Maugham have lost their covers, Animal Farm’s glue has entirely packed up. I think this is fair enough as they’re basically unreadable. Books that are so damaged they’re basically unreadable. ![]() This doesn’t mean I think they’re bad books, just that they’re so far down the ‘to be read’ list that I’m pretty sure I’ll never get round to them. I’m looking, for example, at you Bring me Sunshine by Charlie Connelly. Books I bought cheaply that I didn’t really want in the first place but were more of a donation to the church/school/etc fair. Just to clarify, Sarah, all your books have survived the purification. The bad news is that there are so few books that fall into this category that it doesn’t make much of a dent in the problem. ![]() A big wrench this one and I don’t want to go into detail for obvious reasons, but although I hugely appreciate people giving me their book and writing something personal and jolly in it just for me, if it’s not my cup of tea and I didn’t even ask for it in the first place then, after a suitably reverent interval, it’s going, going, gone. So while I'm a huge fan of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon books, his other stuff, not so much, so cheerio. There’s also a subset, books by authors I really like which I only bought on the strength of their name. Quite a lot of Ian McEwan has gone, as have various Haruki Murakami titles. Some are ‘classics’ so I feel obliged to keep them so visitors don’t think I’m an ignoramus, but there are actually a decent number that I’ll certainly never read again as I didn’t like them much/at all first time round. There are a remarkable number of these on my shelves. So to make this current purge easier to achieve, I came up with some categories of books that can go: If I haven’t read a book, well, it’s not going anywhere until I’ve at the very least got to page 30. If I’ve read a book, I look on it for better or worse as a little accomplishment and it’s physical presence on my shelves is a proud reminder to me (and in my more narcissistic humble-brag moments to anybody else having a crafty glance along them) of a job well done. All of which means that it’s time, as it is roughly once a decade, to have a clearout.Ĭhoosing what to wave an actual goodbye to rather than make a more non-committal au revoir is of course quite tricky (I’d strongly recommend I Murdered My Library, a Kindle Single available on Amazon by Linda Grant on this very subject). On top of which, my children want to turn the basement – which is essentially a home library at the moment – into some kind of chillout zone. We also have cardboard boxes and boxes of them in the attic and slightly hidden around the house (many of these are children’s books which I’m hoping any grandchildren who turn up in the next few years will enjoy). I refuse to doublebank them (my parents have no such issues, madness I say, madness) and I’m not a great fan of slipping books horizontally on top of their vertically-shelved brethren. The downside of liking books, writing books, and working in the book industry is that I’m surrounded by them wherever I go in the house.Īs first world problems go, this is right up there with being unable to source low salt Marmite at Waitrose, but still it is a constant struggle to find room for new arrivals on bookshelves. It shows a rhythmic gymnast doing a pirouette with a ribbon, over a gaping hole in the wall.īORODYANKA, Ukraine: Amid the ruins of war, the flowerings of art.The upside of liking books, writing books, and working in the book industry is that I’m surrounded by them wherever I go in the house. President Vladimir Putin of Russia is a judo practitioner.Ī Banksy-like painting, also in black and white and again not confirmed as his by Banksy himself, also appeared on the wall of a war-damaged building in the town of Irpin, on Kyiv’s northwestern outskirts. Towering above her are the gutted, blown-apart innards of what were once apartments.Īnother mural in the town - of a small boy doing a judo throw on a man - also looked like it might be Banksy’s, although that wasn’t posted on his Instagram page. The mural of the gymnast is in black and white and is painted so she looks like she is doing her handstand on the crumpled remains of concrete blocks that poke out of the blackened wall. The town was the target of shelling and fighting in the early stages of the Russian invasion, which turned apartment buildings into charred, bombed-out hulks. A delicate painting of a gymnast doing a handstand has popped up on the wall of a wrecked building outside of Kyiv and appears to be the work of the British graffiti artist known as Banksy.īanksy posted photos on his Instagram page of the artwork in Borodyanka, northwest of Ukraine’s capital. ![]()
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