My reward for working eight hours with a headache today

was to go to Bongs & Noodles and buy myself a nice book. Since it is going to be my only new book for a really long time, I skipped the children's books that looked appealing (figuring it would be fewer words and a shorter read for my buck), and I even skipped buying Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy, which I thoroughly wanted (because my mum already has them, and it seems silly to weigh down the foundations of my house any more than I must with books we already have), and in the end I decided to get Richard Burton's famed translation of 1001 Nights. Unexpurgated. Which means there are bits about the sultan's wife and concubines being futtered wildly by lots of manly burly men hiding in trees and waiting for the sultan to go out hunting. And wives of afreets that tell people to futter her or die. In other news, I really enjoy the word futter, which is so bizarre that it is not even in the OED.

(I just looked up Richard Burton on Wikipedia and learned a few interesting things about him. Apparently he was all interested in sex and everyone was angry at him for corrupting Algernon Charles Swinburne into a life of drink and drugs and reading dirty books; and apparently he was reputed to have killed a man on his trip to Mecca and one time a doctor asked him, "How do you feel when you have killed a man?" and Richard Burton said, "Quite jolly, what about you?")

I also had the opportunity to practice my bookstore hobby, which is this: You know how sometimes you are looking at stacks/shelves of books and for one reason and another you realize that the book on top or in front is not the same book as the book behind or beneath it? Well, when I discover that, and if the incorrectly placed book is bad, then I hide it. If it's good, I use it to hide some other, bad book that is in the same general vicinity. Today I used Madame Bovary to hide Mrs. Darcy. Don't bother looking for the idiotic sequel to Pride and Prejudice, everyone! You won't find it!

Mwahahaha. And now back to my dirty book.