Another symptom of my tragic inability to cope without books

I went into London today, right, my last day trip to London for the time being, and I decided not to bring a book.

Okay, okay, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: IMPOSSIBLE LUNACY. And in a way I was thinking that too, as I made the decision. Never have I ever been able to go for an entire day without some reading material. However, I cunningly made concessions for myself: I read some stuff before I left; I arranged my schedule for the day so that it was very full; and I brought my mp3 player to listen to on the train.

As it turns out, not even remotely enough steps taken. I got tired of listening to all that music without any reading breaks about twenty minutes into the train journey. I started doing that thing with my mp3 player that I do when I don't get reading breaks and just have uninterrupted music (I love music but it does not require enough of my brain to be a proper past-time), the thing where a song starts and I get cranky because I don't KNOW that song and I can't sing ALONG with it in my BRAIN so how can I even remotely be bothered with it? and so I skip to the next song and I get cranky because I ALREADY KNOW this song, and for God's sake, I didn't get a whole bunch of new music just so I could listen to songs like this that are OLD NEWS. Which leads to my skipping 98 songs out of a hundred, and the remaining two I basically listen to half of and then get angry because I know how they're going to end and I can't be bothered waiting around for it.

(Me = not a hardcore music girl.)

It all came to a head when I I decided to have one last meal at Wagamama, for I realized as I was walking towards it that there was just no way that I could eat my meal alone and have nothing to read. It would just spoil it. I would just get cranky at the food and that would be a shame, given that it was going to be my last chicken katsu curry for quite some time. Luckily there are those book stalls by the National Theatre, so I toddled over there and spent thirty minutes looking for a book that I could buy and read during lunch and on the train home (and on the train to and from Cambridge tomorrow! I rationalized to myself). This is the same thing as the tooth-brushing incident but on a larger scale -- again, my meal took only very little over thirty minutes, so I really did spend as much time looking for the book as I did reading it.

It's Middlemarch. So far not bad. It's kind of like if Jane Eyre were much less fun and married St. John Rivers before she met Mr. Rochester. This is an optimistic assessment. I'm kind of still waiting for Mr. Rochester to show up, and I don't know George Eliot well enough to assume that he will.

In case you're wondering: yes, sometimes I do find myself a little tragic.

Oh! (This will in no way make me seem less tragic.) The book stalls in question continue with their bizarre excellence as a resource for Oscar Wilde. In the past I have seen loads of books on Oscar Wilde: H. Montgomery Hyde's biography, Richard Ellmann's, Philippe Julian's, and Vyvyan Holland's memoirs. Today Richard Ellmann's one was there again, and they had a paperback copy of Frank Harris's Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions. I really cannot understand where they get all these (now) obscure books about Oscar Wilde. It is uncanny.