Raymond Chandler makes the cut

Waking up this morning I twisted around weirdly in bed and gave myself vertigo.  As you can imagine, this has colored my entire Sunday since I had planned to spend it reading and haven't been able to do much of that at all. 

What I have managed to do is set out a new plan for getting the situation in my apartment under control.  As I was mulling over the plan, I was sorting through and folding neatly quite a large pile of clean clothes that I had tossed onto the tumble of boxes in the little hallway just outside the washer / dryer closet.

This photo isn't from today, but it's a pretty close representation. Washer / dryer closet doors are on the left.

As the pile grew smaller and the tumble of cardboard was uncovered, I began thinking about what other uses that little patch of my apartment might have. This line of thought, paired with my six month plan of either moving when my lease runs out in May 2015 or making this an apartment that I can actually live in, soon led to the new plan.

The new plan is quite simple; it involves going through one box (or bag) every day and dealing with all of the contents, the point being to give or throw away the majority of the items and document and consolidate neatly what remains.

If you know anything about me, you know I have a lot of books. Today, I took the largest box of books from the hallway and a large box of books from the stack just inside the doorway of the book room. I unpacked both boxes of books, cataloged them all into Library Thing, and separated them into four piles: want to keep - rebox; want to read - put on the shelf; give or send to friends / put on offer for students at office; take to the Book Exchange, library, etc.

At the end of all the sorting, I vacuumed the newly clear space in the hallway and moved my little writing table into it from the kitchen (where it's been living under a whole other stack of boxes for at least a year).

It's a small writing space, but it works.

Then I put the want to read sooner than later books on the shelves, and bagged up the trade-ins / giveaways and put them by the door to take to the car. The rebox group fit neatly into a box about half the size of the two original boxes, with room to spare.

Together at last: Lemony Snicket, Douglas Adams, Clyde Edgerton.

While I don't need the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker collection at my fingertips, it's good to know that I have it and can get to it fairly easily if there's an emergency.

What went up on the shelves to be read sooner than later? An Instance at the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, the two Library of America volumes of Raymond Chandler's works (Later Writings and Other Writings, Stories and Early Novels), The Information by Martin Amis (surely I read that in my Amis phase? no memories are surfacing), A Book of Memories by Peter Nadas, and Michael Malone's Foolscap. And so the Library Thing author gender count moves even farther into the masculine.

And in the giveaway pile? Mostly hardbacks of books I won't read again or also have in paperback including Toni Morrison's Paradise, Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, Larry's Party by Carol Shields, some Carlos Fuentes, and Amis's London Fields.

All this goes to the car in the morning! Yes, there's some recycling too.

As I was working the BBC Radio 4 show A Good Read kept me great company, and I would recommend it to anyone who loves books and is always on the lookout for titles to add to the to be read list.  The host of the show and two guests each recommends something for the group to read and they come together to discuss the three books. They shows are archived so that the recent shows and older shows are interspersed, so if you keep clicking on "Previous Show" you'll go back and forth between 2014 to 1998, etc. The BBC has a plethora of other book-related radio shows for when I've listened to all of the Good Read archives. While I do enjoy hearing from authors on shows like KCRW's Bookworm, I also like hearing lay readers discuss why they do or don't like a book.

When I felt faint and / or dizzy throughout the day, I fortified myself with strong, sweet hot tea and snacked on sandwiches of the pork tenderloin I roasted yesterday, topped with mayonnaise, jabanero jelly and lots of salt and pepper.  When I absolutely had to take a break and actually read something, I went with The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason. A friend whose book recommendations I trust completely gave this book a very strong recommendation, and after just over a hundred pages I have not been disappointed.