Welcome to my Bookshelves- Guest Post by Claire Varley
The Bit in Between by Claire Varley is published by Macmillan (RRP$29.99)
A review of this book was published on August 14th.
A review of this book was published on August 14th.
Over to Claire!
I buy more books than I can afford and will no
doubt end up in the poor house because of it. Online bookstores are my drug of
choice and oftentimes books arrive at my door that I have completely forgotten
I ordered, thus is the extent of my problem. Every book is special to me – I
get upset when people want to borrow books and become anxious they won’t give
them back. I share books like a four-year-old only child – begrudgingly and
only after being promised sweeties.
Because of this addiction, I have taken to
calling my bedside table my BOOKside table (chuckles to self). I am aware that
it is actually a chair. We repurpose things in this house because I spend all
the actual money on books. Also repurposed are the books propping up my bedroom
mirror because there’s no more room on the bookshelves and we aren’t going to
mount the mirror on the wall because we would like our bond back. In this
picture both my hair and mirror need washing.
In our salon (ie the bit of the unit that is
not our bedroom) my books are ordered thus: on the big elegant faux-antique bookcase
that I scored after my mother modernised her furniture I have
memoirs/autobiographies at the top, poetry in the middle, and hobby books (gardening,
sewing etc) at the bottom atop the schmancy wine section we have filled with
cleanskins. I like to think of this as my grown up bookshelf – the one I would present
to the Queen if she dropped by. To the right of the poetry section you can see
my older brother and I being the nineties.
On the BILLY series IKEA bookshelf that has
really weird shelf spacing because I assembled it in a windowless room, are the
rest of my books. There isn’t much organisation: travel books, non-fiction at
the bottom, bath-damaged Penguin classics, then everything else. I arrange my
favourites towards the front so that the Queen would be quietly impressed if
she glanced over whilst touring the more elegant bookshelf. Above, atop the
actual bookshelf, are my boyfriend’s engineering textbooks. I would remove them
if I could but I’m too short and the chair is otherwise occupied by the bed.