The addition of a second hand bookshop to the Student Union is bad. Very bad.
I’ll concede to some redeeming features. Firstly, some of the texts are extortionate if you buy them new-and here I point the finger at the Geography textbook that cost me the best part of one hundred squids in First Year (I was young, new and naïve. How I’ve learned). Plus, for the people on Educational grants, the sundries allowance has been slashed this year, so make your savings where you can.
Secondly, it looks like a good spot to pick up secondary reading material, which the lovely old lecturers mention is passing and then put on exam papers, just ‘cause they can. They don’t always have the recommended texts in the ‘real’ bookshop, and the last time someone ordered one in, they had three kids and a mortgage before the thing arrived. Thus, I’m happy to let someone else do the initial buying, and then pass it on cheaply when they are done and I am in need.
Downside?? I already spend the equivalent of the national debt of small European nations on books. I don’t need any more. If I didn’t buy another book until next October, I’d still have plenty to keep me going. And then some. So I went in to this new musty bookshop today, making a solemn vow to myself that I WOULD NOT BUY ANYTHING.
Fittingly I emerged ten minutes later with two Marina Warner paperbacks and a new pen.
Sigh. My book buying is a standing joke with everyone I know. My parents keep threatening to throw me out because my collection has spilled over the boundaries of my (tiny) bedroom and expanded onto the landing. The girls in work at the weekend use me as a library (only they never seem to remember that you’re supposed to give the books back). My grandmother just takes paperbacks unashamedly from the stack beside my bed, safe in the knowledge that, due to sheer volume, they will not be missed. We once had a book related accident, where my bookcase collapsed (I think it was the addition of Richardsons' Clarissa that did it) and I was buried in an avalanche of paperbacks.
This brings me to Kittys’ Bookshelf, where I intend to share with the whole internet (rofl) what I am reading at the moment. This is purely self indulgent, yes, but hopefully we will all learn something.
See you back here soon for the first proper instalment.
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