This week I’ve decided that I want to complete my collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and short stories. Not only have I decided I want to complete my collection, but seeing as the two novels are of a similar design, I want my entire collection of Fitzgerald’s to be from this particular printing from the mid-1970s. Bless eBay and Abebooks¹.  Does anyone else get like this? It doesn’t even make sense because my books aren’t properly shelved, so it’s not as though they’ll look pretty lined up together on a shelf. Crazy. I really don’t understand it, but even thinking about buying the same title from a different printing seems completely impossible. Thank God I don’t get like this with every book I buy, it’s rather stressful.

Less than a week until Clunes! To keep you happily distracted while I work out my game plan (seriously, what would be the ideal method for carrying my new books around – I’ve considered getting one of those granny shopping carts and pimping it up a bit! That’d be so badass, even if I was the only one that thought so.) for next weekend:

• The BBC asks: Were the mad heroines of literature really sane?
• On literature’s influence upon musicians:

“When the private world of reading and the public world of performance mesh happily, all parties benefit: musicians appearing cerebral, writers appearing hip, readers and listeners feeling smart.”

• A romantic look at the independent bookstore in the digital age, some of the reasons put forward here are the same that were espoused upon the emergence of digital music versus record stores; comments like this:

“Independent bookstores remain a sensual and social experience that will be tough to replace. Going to a bookstore is as much about physically browsing. As smart as Amazon’s ‘Customer’s Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ metadata is, it’s no replacement for mooching around the fiction section and skimming novels yourself. Or the serendipitous eye-catching of a face-out cover or flipping through several books without laggy downloads.”

• are eerily similar to what we were saying about the physical aspects of music less than ten years ago, you know, incessant whining about cover art and whatnot. While I agree with the sentiment, ignoring the realities and implications of a changing business landscape isn’t going to help the future of the physical bookstore.
• The Miles Franklin Award shortlist was announced during the week (almost tempted to try and read all of the nominated novels, I’m still contemplating it.) and Alex Miller had a few choice words to say about the lack of relevance of the literary award.

¹ Speaking of Abebooks, do you think of it as Abe, as in Abe Simpson, Abe Lincoln, and all those other famous Abes; or A.B.E.? I’ve always thought of it as Abe, but I was speaking to a more experienced bookseller this week and he referred to it as A.B.E. and my whole world fell apart. But, then I got to talk at length to a little kid about the upcoming Iron Man film and then I was okay again.