[photo credit: shelbychicago at flickr]

I bought a whole heap of books this week. Stacks. The injuries acquired lugging them home will possibly require chiropractic care. With my bookstore closing and everything heavily discounted, plus staff discount, the accumulated loot only cost me about $3 a book, but I feel awkward and a little embarrassed displaying them here. (Not just because I may have bought some Gossip Girl books.) Instead of talking about the books I bought, this week, I’m going to gift you all with a number of links to some equally fascinating reading.

Jeanette Winterson reviews The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar at the New York Times. Highsmith is someone I have found myself increasingly drawn to, mainly due to her incredibly colourful personal history. I’m yet to read any of Highsmith’s fiction, but I imagine I will in the future, as well as a number of the biographies written about her. Winterson touches upon some of the intriguing aspects of Patricia Highsmith’s life in her review, so it is worth reading.

“Highsmith had a kind of archive-­attachment disorder; she adored lists. She chronicled, mapped, numbered and cross-referenced everything in her life, and even rated her lovers, but she wiped out what didn’t suit her and only vaguely acknowledged, when pressed by the more ferrety kind of interviewer, having conjured up a few story lines for Superman and Batman.”

Robert McCrum was invited to take a look at the Bodleian library collection of Kafka manuscripts – “What possible significance could a few boxes of manuscript have in the digital age? I was dead wrong.” – leading him to consider the many issues raised regarding the digitization of literature in general.

Margo Rabb surveys independent bookstores to find out which title is most often stolen from their stores. The answers and stories may surprise you.

“But this doesn’t mean that every reader is contributing to the bottom line. Only 40 percent of books that are read are paid for, and only 28 percent are purchased new, said Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group, a consultant to the publishing industry. The rest are shared, borrowed, given away — or stolen.”

A bit of a David Foster Wallace love-fest in the online literary world this week with “All That“, an excerpt from his unfinished novel The Pale King to be released in 2010, published this week in the New Yorker.  GQ published an interview with Deborah Treisman, Wallace’s editor, discussing The Pale King and her working relationship with DFW.

Lauren Leto has written a funny-because-it-is-(mostly)-true list of how to stereotype readers by their favourite authors.You will laugh and nod and say “oh my God, I know someone just like that!” to at least one of her stinging barbs.

And, finally, in I could have told you this but I don’t have the science degree and research funding to back it up, whiskey hangovers are officially worse than vodka hangovers. Consider this your friendly festive and completely scientific warning to take it easy on the booze over the Christmas period.

I’ll admit it is very possible I went a little overboard this week, but this is what happens when your sister tells you about a street near her house with a multitude of good book shops with strapping young bookstore lads manning the counters. Resistance is futile.

• The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
  

  Book Loot: Week Ending November 22nd, 2009

• The Drought by J.G. Ballard
• Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard
• Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank
• Underworld by Don DeLillo
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
• Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia by Charles Hodgson
• A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
• Ironweed by William Kennedy
• The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
• Days of Reading by Marcel Proust
• The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
• Julian / Williwaw / The Judgement of Paris / Messiah / The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal

I went into the secondhand bookstore, completely expecting to hand over hard-earned cash in exchange for novels, the guy who works there – who usually gives me a significant discount anyway – gave them to me as a gift? I mean, that was a really wonderful thing for a rainy Sunday morning, but it doesn’t excuse the ridiculousness of this week’s haul.

There’s always this fabulous list of Reasons for Buying Books to try and ease the guilt.