My Inner Troglodyte

27 Absolutely Stunning Underground Homes:

I want a cave house, dammit!

'via Blog this'

"A good book has no ending"

"Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."  ~Henry Ward Beecher

I do love me some garage sales.

Today, while driving to the library, I had to take a detour as my usual street was closed off due to the Whiskey Row Off-road Mountain Bike Race. Since I used to drive all over town, delivering medication, I know a lot of shortcuts and side streets that will get me where I want to go. This particular shortcut took me around the back of the Arizona Pioneers' Home, where I realized they were having a rummage sale. I almost drove on past, but saw out of the corner of my eye several tables lined with books, which immediately pulled me up short. The siren call of the cheap printed page is impossible to deny.

When I went up there, I was handed a medium-sized paper bag and told I could fill it up for only a dollar, which I gleefully proceeded to do.

Today's haul:

The Living Bible--Reference Edition. Before this, I had one of those huge, bulky PTL Parallel Editions (Living Bible and King James) which will go immediately into my library donation box.

The Man Who Listens To Horses, Monty Roberts. I seem to remember reading something years ago about some things in this book not being true. A quick Google-fu turned this up. It's a good reminder that nothing ever dies on the Internet.

Twilight, Stephenie Meyer. Yes, I know. But I figure at a cost of approximately ten cents for the trade paperback, I can afford to throw the thing against the wall and stomp it into the floor if I feel like it. Or maybe chapter-blog it if it's especially hilarious.

CDs: I've Got a Right To Cry, Mandy Barnett. Old-fashioned, twangy, stringy, Patsy Cline-style country.

Natural Dreams: Amazon Odyssey. It's supposed to be Latin New Age music, but it didn't sound particularly Latino to me. Either way, they still got ripped straight into the computer. I suppose I'm hopelessly old-fashioned in that I insist on keeping the (horrors!) actual physical compact discs, instead of relying on the magical pixels. (I still have a few cassettes, too. Anybody remember those?)

Plus several Westerns, including two Louis L'Amour paperbacks, for my mother.

Next, I went down to the Big Box Retailer Who Dare Not Speak Its Name, where I found some YA books I've been looking at online for a while. I'm a sucker for dystopian/post-apocalyptic stories, and there seem to be a lot of these in the young-adult genre recently. I picked up Veronica Roth's Divergent, Julie Kagawa's The Immortal Rules and Dan Wells' Partials, which proceeded to blow my book budget for the month to tiny Times New Roman bits.

No matter. Books are my indulgence, my pleasure, my passion, unapologetically so. This is why I keep up my listing on Library Thing--if the house ever burns down, I can and will replace them.

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart"

Here's a lovely quote from Charles Dickens.

Making books ... is very much like building houses; and the author is a more or less happy combination of architect and carpenter. A house, when it is properly put together, is a harmonious union of foundation, frame, clap-boards, doors, window, and shingles: and when one comes to think it over, a properly made book is about the same thing. Anybody can collect all these units--these bits of material--but everybody cannot put them together in the right way.

Or put them together at all, for that matter.

I never thought I was a juggler--or a homebuilder--or a worker of puzzles. (Actually, I used to work puzzles, but I don't think I'd have the patience now.) But when you're a writer, you're all of those things and more.

Architect. Carpenter. Hammer-slammer. Puzzle-builder.

Writer.