2nd January one of my bookshelves collapsed. I've got a decent size bedroom and all my books are shelved on the walls. I was downstairs watching something really boring on the telly when a tremendous crash came from above so I rushed upstairs, well rushed to the stairs then paused. What stopped me was the thought that it might have been a burglar crashing through the ceiling or a madman with an axe sweeping my books to the floor in his demented rage, or a book troll unhappy that the plot of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is so fiendishly complicated, these and many other daft ideas rushed hither and thither as I paused with one hand on the rail looking upwards like some Christian supplicant.
"Hullo" I called before me, "Is anyone there?" The kind of genteel question that by its tone and form would confirm to any waiting predator that in this house lives someone who is A VICTIM and therefore should cause them no trouble whatsoever. Every few steps I stopped to listen for heavy breathing and maybe the swish of something with a blade cleaving the air in practice, but there was nothing so with a toe I gently pushed my way into the bedroom taking care all the while to look through the crack and confirm that no psycopath lurked, behind the door, with a machete, on tiptoes, ready to pounce, the way they do.
A change in room accoustics really emphasised the pathetic in my hollow laugh.
The whole experience set me wondering if books were becoming more heavy. Over Christmas I read the excellent Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a fantastic novel about English magicians at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and though brilliant is extremely heavy and gave me wrist ache when I read it in the bath. I also treated myself to Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, a recently published stupendously large and learned tome written by one of the great journalists of the last 30 years. Mind you these two books are on the floor by the bed and have never been on the shelves so it couldn't have been them that caused the collapse. In the end I determined it was my crap workmanship in using screws and rawplugs that were not adequate to the job when putting up the shelves. Of course the blame really lies with my school woodwork and metalwork teachers for fervently believing that violence was the only pedagogy worthy of the name. One result of their painful largesse was that I learned not a jot about 'do it yourself'. Pity it wasn't upon them that the shelves collapsed, though such a thing might have raised more questions than it answered.
5 comments:
Hi Dan, got here via Guyana Gyal. You've got it all wrong - big books like that are meant for propping up bits of plank to make the bookshelf, not for putting on the bookshelf. Or else as handy doorsteps. (I loved Jonathan Strange too, despite the wrist ache).
Ohhhhh you brave man, Dan, shouting fearlessly to a set of books and one collapsed bookshelf. Go, you hero you :-)
Ah, you want a big, hefty book? A Suitable Boy by Vickram Seth.
Annie,
I know that thing about big books, especially good in the summer when doors need keeping open however the stubbed toe hazard is consequently increased. I'm pissed off with The Independent newspaper here in the UK because now it has shrunk it's got heavier. When I first experienced arm ache from the paper I intially thought it my be some sort of early onset heart problem (tightness in the upper body and that sort of thing), then I assumed it was cancer and most probably in the lymph glands under the arms, then possibly lung fluid tightening the diaphragm, by the time I'd worked out it was the fucking newspaper I was sick with worry. Still it all turned out okay in the end, though it did set me awondering if things were getting more heavy or I was getting weaker.
G,
I've seen A Suitable Boy on shelves and have been put off by its enormous size. Can't people tell shorter stories anymore. What's the matter with them for Christ's sake. I rather like the Dickensian style of writing in intstalments. I did read somewhere about e-books that might not weigh as much but I'm not sure if hauling a pc or laptop onto the train so you can enjoy your latest Rushdie or Fielding would be any improvement. I fear backs may continue to suffer.
when I was young I suffered repeated "reading injuries." Mostly sprained thumbs from holding books splayed open in the palm of my hand too long, and once chipped a front tooth because I was reading while eating my lunch and lost track of where the fork was.
most embarrassing.
Hayden,
Ah, voracious readers always need to be careful when eating, not only because of stabbing hazards but also dropping food onto page. I have licked food off more pages than I care to remember, well, I've never been one to let good either good food or a good novel go to waste.
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