The part of my brain that peddles the Crazy

I had a $100 gift card to Amazon recently, and I used it all up buying books. It was an agonizing decision. There are a lot of books I don’t own or have readily available to me now that I’ve moved out of my parents’ house for good, and it was very, very hard to choose which books I wanted. And I think that the decision-making process was one of those things that really throws into sharp relief the perils of giving in to the Crazy.

Graphic novels: I thought of getting Death: The High Cost of Living but did not on account of Anna having left her copy at home when she moved away (plus I am holding out for The Compleat Death which I just discovered existed); and I wanted to get Blankets by Craig Thompson but could not remember if it was as good as all that and furthermore it was $20, far too large a chunk of my $100 for a book I couldn’t even remember that well. I do remember it being quite, quite good though. And I wanted to get it because I am trying to read more books by men so that I won't be a sexist reader. Because this one time I fussed at my friend Chris for only reading books by men, and then I remembered that virtually all my favorite books (Fire and Hemlock, The Color Purple, I Capture the Castle, The Time Traveler's Wife, To Kill a Mockingbird, Greensleeves, Jane Eyre) are by women. And this would be a guy author and a graphic novel and a grown-up book, so it would fulfill three affirmative action type quotas. But it was $20. None of the other books I got cost that much. I'd have had to sacrifice two big or three little books in order to get Blankets.

Bookshelf limitations: My bookshelf is quite large, but it has quite small shelves, tall enough for mass market paperbacks but not trade paperbacks. I have to stack trade paperbacks and hardbacks sideways on my bookshelf. This was a problem during the book-ordering process. I wanted to get Fire from Heaven but could not because my copies of The Charioteer and The Persian Boy are both mass market paperback, and Fire from Heaven was only available in trade paperback, and then they wouldn’t have matched so I would have had to shelve them separately.

Strategy: I didn’t get any still-in-print kids’ books (apart from Hilary McKay, who is unreliably available in America), any recent bestsellers, or any classics, because I think those are more likely to be discoverable at garage sales and library and university book sales. Hence I did not purchase The View from Saturday or Jennifer, Hecate, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth; I did not purchase Special Topics in Calamity Physics; and I did not – although I greatly wanted to – purchase Aurora Leigh or anything by G.K. Chesterton.

St. Ignatius and his theories about consolation and desolation: I almost didn’t get the three Martin Millar books. I thought, Oh, Jenny, hold off on those, you haven’t read them enough to be sure that you will always like them, and you haven’t read Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me at all. But when I thought of not getting the three Martin Millar books, I was filled with a soul-deep sadness, and I ended up getting them after all, because it was clear to me from this sadness that God wanted me to get them.

That’s right. My life is all about strategy. And yes, okay, I will acknowledge that my life is a little bit about serious control issues, and sometimes I should just chill out and get the books I want when I want them – but I HAVE A SYSTEM.

Here was the final tally:

Saffy's Angel
Indigo's Star
Permanent Rose (all by Hilary McKay; because I haven't got them)
Keturah and Lord Death
The Dollmage
Tom Finder (all by Martine Leavitt, my new this-year discovery)
The Blue Castle, L.M. Montgomery (because my old copy got all coffee-y)
Sunshine, Robin McKinley (I haven't got this either, and almost didn't get it because the other Robin McKinley book I own, Beauty, is in the not-grownups book section of my books, and buying Sunshine will necessitate a transfer of both to the grown-up section. But then I remembered that I also want to buy Deerskin so I would have had to have Robin McKinley books in the grown-up section of my bookshelf anyway. So I went ahead and got it.)
Getting the Girl, Markus Zusak (it is a sequel but the first one isn't in print here)
The Good Fairies of New York
Lonely Werewolf Girl
Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me (all by Martin Millar, my other new this-year discovery - or maybe last year? I can't remember when I read The Good Fairies of New York)

I also got two other books I can't mention here because I am getting copies of them for Anna for Christmas. Don't tell. I am most of all excited about the books by authors whose first names begin with M, three of which are new books to me. I am so excited about Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me that I lost patience waiting and went to Amazon and read the excerpt they offered me, and it was charming and made me feel even more impatient. I wanted to run searches on Amazon Reader for random words that would allow me to read large chunks of the book, but I forbear because I want to delay gratification. Here's the bit I read:

We go into a comic shop on Oxford Street and look at some comics and then Manx finds a large display of dolls from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are figures of Buffy, Willow, Xander, Angel, Spike, and some others. We are entranced...

"I'd like to buy all these Buffy dolls and play with them. I'll have time on my hands soon, I've almost finished the Led Zeppelin book. I'm at the 'nice and big' stage."

"What's the 'nice and big' stage?"

"I go through the text making sure I haven't used any long words. If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big'. I've liked these words ever since I was told not to use them in English class at school. And I make sure that the sentences are short so as people won't get confused and I shorten all the chapters so they won't get bored. I can't read anything complicated these days, my attention span is too short. Everyone else probably feels the same."

I love Martin Millar. I really do. I am only sad that Neil Gaiman didn't tell me about Martin Millar long ago. And I am glad that I had desolation in response to the notion of not getting his books, so that now instead of having no books by Martin Millar, which was not representative of my ever-growing fondness for his books, I will have three.

Edit to add: Shit. I've only just remembered that Good Fairies is mass market (because if I got it in mass market paperback I got Saffy's Angel for free), and the other two trade, paperback. And now it's too late to change. However, I have rationalized this into being okay because I have put some of my Neil Gaiman books (the hardbacks and graphic novels) on the top shelf of my bookshelf, and I have put the paperbacks on another shelf. And I will just do the same with Martin Millar, and Good Fairies can be sensibly shelved with Neil Gaiman as it has an introduction by him. Hurrah. Serious shelving crisis averted.