New (Old) Books!!

I haz unpacked:

The Handy edition Scotts.

More Handy edition Scotts, a few others, and peeping in at the left are a couple of the set of H.G. Wells.

Pretty books! See me preen!

But then, I think I did mention how much I like sets of books:

The Star Wars books are double stacked. The Terry Pratchets will be just as soon as we find the rest of them...and the reason we have duplicate Harry Potters is because we both wanted to read it as soon as it came out.

Mmmm books. The sad thing is, I have very few actual classics, simply because they're on the whole out of copyright, which means I read the e-books instead, which don't have the nifty gold embossed red leather spines to sit on my bookshelf (and take up far too much space). So maybe when I've finished Jane Austen (in the middle of Mansfield Park at the moment), I shall find a nice image of her books on a shelf and place that here as testament to my hours spent ploughing through 18th century England (it's been hard, I can tell you).

And it's back to work... A! G! A-I-N!

For those of you who didn't spend the mid-90s swooning over Blur's album Parklife, learning all the lyrics off by heart and taping their every performance on Top of the Pops (a popular music programme back in the day - ask your parents), the title of this post comes from a song called "Bank Holiday". It's a Bank Holiday today. I am working.

This weekend was spent fetching boxes of books from my parents' house. I have several thousand books. Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with so many libraries, I have nowhere to keep them. There are a few I could probably stand to get rid of - Ben Elton, chicklit I read once for a lack of anything else to do, buried under the rest of the books there are probably quite a few Point Horror books and maybe a couple of Christopher Pikes that can be disposed of (I had a terribly uncultured and lowbrow taste in reading - still do, for that matter).

But the rest I still want - lots of classics, and modern-day classics, because they just look so nice on my shelves (and make for pretty good reading too). Rows and rows of Agatha Christie, Stephen King, James Patterson (because I like sets of books) - when I have the room in my house they'll sit beside the M.C. Beatons and Terry Pratchetts that currently take up a not inconsiderable amount of room in my bookcase.

I've not brought back with me any of those though. Nope, I'm starting classy (and then plummeting down to the depths of awful, no doubt), and now I need to find shelf space for my grandmother's 1877(ish) Handy editions of Scott, cherry-red, calfbound, gold leaf on the outer edges...yummy. Pictures to follow when I get home =)

I Could Tell You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You

Er...hello? Is this thing on?

Since my last post began with me being embarrassed at how long it's been since my last post, perhaps I'd better not start this post the same way... So, instead we shall begin with a strong recommendation to visit the Splendour & Power Exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, since I've just come from there and it is fab-u-lous!

Now, I shall cringe at how long it has been since my buoyant post about the state of my library degree (which is, sadly, much in the same state as it was six months ago). In that time, there has been much upheaval at work, but I can't say in any detail what that upheaval is/was, or what its repercussions have been. Suffice to say, I'm trying to coping with significant change, more responsibility, etc. etc..

I've got another reason for not writing on here, though. I've been prioritising and taking stock of a lot of things, and one thing I considered is what my blog should actually be about. In between just getting work done, and trying to find time to do my degree work, I don't have the energy to keep abreast of all the new and wonderful things Library 2.0 has to offer. Thus, if I'm keeping a blog, it's not going to be about me and my attempts to engage with these wonderful widgets.

I have basically two directions I can take, I think. One is to keep it professional, following work and degree work. The advantage here is that it has a clear and specific interest (I hope) and a single focus. Later on, when I have finished my degree and work has settled a bit, I might be able to re-embrace the digital world and engage with it. The disadvantage is that there are lots of things about work that are actually confidential, so I'd be struggling to find the balance between being too vague to be any use, and being so informative that I'm being too open.

The second is to make it more personal. There's more to me than just librarianship! The advantage is that I can take it in interesting directions and (hopefully) find a distinct voice in my blogging style (which to my mind is currently pretty bland and faceless). The disadvantage of that is that there may be a lot of crufty entries to sort through before getting to the useful stuff. There aren't going to be many archers interested when I wax lyrical about Notre Dame polyphony, nor musicians interested in my love of 1980s children's TV. Maybe.

Which brings me to a slightly sobering point - there are far more blogs created than read. Ultimately, I'm going to be doing this more for my own ego-massaging benefit than to actually be engaging with other people. It kind of defeats the object of Web 2.0 of democracy of communication, if the only person I'm communicating with (if in a slightly roundabout and public way) is myself.