books: an expensive and cluttering vice

It’s dangerous to walk into Charlie Byrne‘s, the second-hand bookshop in Galway; though it’s quickly followed by the joy of rambling through the many floors of Kennys. Charlie Byrne’s is one of the best second-hand bookshops in Ireland–in my biased opinion–having trawled through a fair number of them in my day.

Today I came away clutching fives tomes, and grinning from ear-to-ear. Three of them are academic film books that should prove useful next year, one is a book of Scandinavian folk-tales, and the final text is the perfect source material for one of the stories I’m hacking currently. The timing is so dead-on it’s suspicious. It’s a case of wondering why, on a whim, I decided to look at a section of the bookshop I don’t normally search in case it had material on a different subject matter.

Ah, the delights of a browsing through bookshops!

Much as I adore ordering books from online retailers, I love the physicality of ambling through bookshops at my leisure, and the thrill of discovering a gem hidden between mouldering paperbacks on musty shelves.

So, I’ve decided on markets for the two stories I’m polishing. I really don’t care if they get tossed away by the editors. As long as they leave this house in the near future, I’ll be happy.

If they return, heels dragging and heads hanging, rejection slips in hand, I’ll just have put them on a diet and fitness regime:

“Jumping Jacks, now! I want to see that flab jiggle and disappear!”