Giving papers and wandering bookshops

[hawkwing_lb]

Today I made it in to town, courtesy of a lift from my long-suffering and incredibly generous mother. (No, she's not reading over my shoulder as I type this, but if she ever reads this blog: thanks, Mum. You're the best.) There I was supposed to give a paper to some fellow-postgrads, and this I succeeded in doing.

I don't know how well I succeeded, because I'm out of my head still, and there were fewer questions than I'd expected - only one or two from a dozen people. So probably did not go so well. But as a reward for getting my arse into town in the first place, I went to the bookshop before I got on the train home.

I always love going into Hodges Figgis. There is no other bookshop for me - never really has been, since a good long while, even when Waterstones was still in business just across the road. So it has ever been the bookshop. Often when I've had no money I've gone in and just browsed, and chatted with one or two of the staff - one of whom, a wonderful woman, always has something good to recommend to me in the young adult or space opera or urban fantasy line, and for whom I'm often able to return the favour.

Today, for example, she recommended Benedict Jacka and Jaye Wells - Jacka with such fervancy that I succumbed, and picked up Fated, despite my resolution to come home with no more than three new books. (Chris Wooding's The Fade, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, and Colin Cotterill's Anarchy and Old Dogs.) I retaliated by recommending Cotterill's The Coroner's Lunch and Pierre Pevel's The Cardinal's Blades.

Never met anyone like that in Easons, or Waterstones, or the other bookshops. Never met people who knew their shit at all in any other bookshop in Ireland. (Where by people, I mean employed people.) It makes me very happy to be able to talk books in a bookshop, however briefly.

Possibly today I was especially very happy because I'd succeeded in leaving the house and doing something other than lying around being sick. But I confess that bookshops and (old, full, not-noisy) libraries are like temples to me: places to go and commune with the magnificence, and the foolishness, and the mediocre middle ground - but mostly the magnificence - of the written word.

Anyway, I'm weird in the head right now, bleary and exhausted. So I'm not going to try doing anything else tonight.

Comments

[helivoy.livejournal.com]

I've gone to that bookstore every time I've visited Dublin. It's a wonderful place to lose yourself in. I bought Jim Fitzpatrick's visually stunning graphic novel Erinsaga from them (other books as well, but that one stands out in my memory).

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

It's a proper bookshop, is what it is.