Spent yesterday afternoon downtown. My resistance has finally crumbled; I just had to buy some books and CDs. Though it's fair to say I didn't exactly buy the books - the tokens I got from doing my bit at the Lit Seminar provided the purchasing power and, despite off-loading the majority of these to three of my nieces, this was enough to create a bit of a headache for me in that there is no shelf space left either in the Hall or at Maison KL to house the new arrivals.
Actually, to try and reduce the damage in terms of the room to be occupied my policy this year, as last, was to go for slim volumes of poetry. This also seemed appropriate since I acquired the loot for the most part by extolling the virtues of particularly short poems. So I picked up collections by Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Charles Simic (a couple in his case), and Wislawa Symborska. Unfortunately there wasn't that much of this kind of thing available and I ended up maxing out the tokens with a couple of volumes closer to criticism than the real thing: Auden's The Dyer's Hand (which for some reason I've never possessed and suddenly decided I desperately needed to, on the grounds that this is great, mad, inspired, creative criticism) and Erica Wagner's book about Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters - Ariel's Gift - which I just had to own as a Ted & Sylvia junkie. I also need to confess that I had to cough up cash for one purchase that sent me over the limit, this being the first volume of Alan Moore's Saga of the Swamp Thing, which former student Rohan warmly recommended to me the other day when we were discussing the merits of various works designated graphic novels.
I can confidently predict it'll take me until this time next year to work my way through this little lot.
Funnily enough I don't feel quite as guilty about the CDs, for which I paid hard cash, probably because we've still got room to store these.
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