Not sure why I enjoy cleaning my bookshelves so much, but I do, which was reason enough to see me vacuuming those in the front room once I got back from work today.
It helps that just rediscovering what's easily at hand here reinforces a happy desire for rereading. Case in point: the other day I was extolling the virtues of John Carey as a critic to one of my classes, citing his book on William Makepeace Thackery as being illuminating in the extreme on a writer who now seems almost entirely out of fashion. This, in turn, put it into my mind that I really should reread his book on John Donne (who, surely, can never go out of fashion) which I think is the better book. And just now I realised the tome in question is in this very room when I thought I'd have to wait for a trip up north to get hold of it.
Just remembered, by the by, that I bought John Donne: Life, Mind and Art from the upmarket Hatchards bookshop in London back in the early 1980s, the only book I ever got from there. I wonder if the shop is still around?
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