A Parcel of Penguins.

I was drafting this morning, and I realised that I needed to know the date of the Branch Davidian Massacre in Waco, Texas.

I've already looked up the date of the Waco massacre, and I've written it down. Twice. On the backs of pieces of paper that had important things on their other side. So heaven knows where they are now.

I may have written something important for The Shore on the back of my CAS Letter, which is the sealed and notarised document that gets me into the country.

So I realised that I needed a notebook dedicated to information about this novel, since it involves a lot of this type of minutia.

The notebook I bought, because every time I go to a bookstore I spend twenty minutes looking at them

 I have a thing for notebooks. An obsession. And i figured that this circumstance justified indulging the obsession. So I went to Waterstones especially for a Paper Blank. Because they are pretty and I've wanted one for a while. Which is why I didn't go for a Moleskine, which are like crack to every academic I know - someone gives us the first one as a present and then ever after you can't switch back. I have one I was given by the head of the writing lab for tutoring my sophomore year of undergrad, and it still looks new. After being in my bag when a water bottle exploded. Twice.

So I went for a notebook, and I had a poke around, and I discovered something beautiful.

I have the biggest intellectual crush on this man. 

There are one hundred of them.

Left to right: The Art of War, A Room of One's Own, and the Tao Te Ching.

They each cost less than a double on the rocks. 

I've gone to bookstores in three cities and I still haven't found a copy of A Tale of a Tub: The hunt is on!

And they make me happy - Penguin was originally founded to provide good, cheap reading material for people in transit, way back when all the real literature worth reading was expensive and not pocket sized. So having a copy of Mill on liberty feels like a wonderful return to basics. Though I may have taken to darting into every bookshop I pass in the hope of finding them all.

If all of my books were bound in this format The Luminaries would probably be six inches thick.

Oh, and look what wandered over my doorstep today:

There was one thing that surprised me upon finally seeing these two side by side:

See it? Seeeee it?

There's a half inch difference in the thickness of these two books. I measured. And it isn't because Twilight has large print and wide margins. Quite the opposite, actually.

Stars on the left, Twilight on the right

For some reason, I expected Stars to be more substantial. And Twilight to be quite a bit less substantial. Huh. So far, the only comparison I can draw is that one's got a handily short title, while the other is a pain to type over and over again. That should soon be remedied by the four hour train journey to Reading that's coming up later this week. I don't know whether I'm apprehensive or excited.