charles barrow's writing

Inevitably, it happened. There was a flaw in my plan and someone elbowed their way through it, carrying the book I was reading, and walked on out the library door with it. You'll have to read my last post to make complete sense of the sentence above, but that will only take you a couple of minutes, so I'll wait..... Yes, a couple of weeks ago, someone borrowed the copy of Real Life, by Brandon Taylor, that I was reading my way through at the library. When I discovered it was missing from the T section on its usual shelf I hunted high and low, across all the display shelves where I had found it once before, but to no avail. It was gone, someone had borrowed it. I checked the on-line catalogue. Yep. It was confirmed. It was out on a three week loan. Damn. Still, I had a Plan B, in the form of about ten thousand other books I could pick up instead. I had promised myself to read a Zadie Smith in this very situation, but there was only one of hers on the shelf and it wasn't one ...

As reported in my last post, I am enduring a self-imposed book buying ban, while I take the opportunity to actually read some of the books I actually already own. It's been 38 days now since I last bought a book. It's been tough. I have been into a bookshop (looking for a calendar) and I've been into several charity shops (same) and I came out of all of them having not bought a book. Quite the victory for a book addict. But before you hand me a medal you should know that I have found a way to bend the rules of this challenge, my own rules. I did create a couple of caveats to this 'not buying books at the moment' challenge. It was that or get arrested for shoplifting a book from Waterstones in a moment of madness. I am in possession of a couple of book tokens at the moment, gifted to me a while back, and I reasoned that it wouldn't be breaking any rules if I acquired books using these vouchers. After all, someone else had parted with the money to buy them, and so...

I just spent an hour in my local library. I usually read novels but I went in to find a short story to read. Any short story. I want to study short story writing, good and bad. Finding time, making time, to sit in a library and read is a surprisingly hard thing to do for some reason. I could of course take books out to read at home but this exercise is about sitting in my local library and reading whichever story I pick out from the rather small selection of volumes that my local library stocks. Perhaps short stories aren't very popular amongst borrowers so the library doesn't stock many titles or, conversely, maybe they are incredibly popular and all out on loan. It's an enjoyable project. I have read a Dickensian whodunnit (Edward Marston), a pulp fiction mystery (Micky Spillane), a sci-fi classic (Ray Bradbury) and a couple of dreadful horror stories - as in horror stories that were dreadfully bad and so I will leave the authors anonymous. There have al...