Well, hello and welcome! Especially to the couple of hundred subscribers that have signed up in the last week. I would like to pretend that it was because of my fascinating and stylish words poured out here for the delectation of fellow bookworms, but I think it’s more to do with this:
I posted it in a note and it sparked an influx of - I presume - introverts to The Bookwormery. Please come in, sit down and make yourselves quietly comfortable. No introductions are required. This is a safe space.
I found the poster as I was reorganising my desk and library (the latter activity forms the basis of the content below the paywall - suffice it to say that I have been having SUCH a good time to myself). I bought it years ago and cannot remember where but for those who have asked where they can get one, the most similar I can find is here.
I think it would pair well with this one, though perhaps its particular message would be more useful printed on a t-shirt, or worn a large, easily-readable lapel badge. A tattoo that could be bared at the appropriate moment is also something to consider.
My fuller thoughts on the matter are here, which I include partly in order to recommend the book mentioned therein - Sophia Dembling’s The Introvert’s Way - which came out a year before but didn’t have the impact of Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking but which I have found to be an unfailingly supportive, gentle helpmeet over the years.
A short break for sunflowers at and from Westgate Farm, North Norfolk, my favourite day trip
Here’s an apparently counterintuitive question, after all our introversioning, for you all now, though. Would you be interested, if I were to figure out how to do one, in having one of these live chat things that Substack apparently offers? You could ask me questions, we could recommend each other books, cry about the weather/politics/the fact that The Residence will not be commissioned for a second series, things like that. If the technology permits mobility, I could even take you round my library once I’ve cleared enough books off the floor for safe passage.
Any extroverts reading this might be confused. I understand, but don’t be! To quote from the linked article above:
“The working definition of an introvert is someone who loses energy by interacting socially,” she [Dembling'] tells me. “An extrovert gains energy from it.” I contemplate this in silence for a moment. “I don’t believe you,” I say. “It’s true,” she says. “I keep a panel of extroverts for research purposes and they say that they get depressed if they don’t get to go to parties and meet lots of people. They actually get unhappy.”
So it’s me and them. “Introverts just don’t have the motivation to go to parties,” says Dembling. “It’s just not our idea of a good time. And we’re no good at small talk. The world is not our friend. We like to meet people we already know, so we can skip past all that and engage properly.”
And I think that’s what we would be doing, no? Skipping past the smalltalk and engaging properly. Also, we could each have drunk exactly enough in our own homes to maximise the likelihood of success. I think it could work, but let me know.
Now - to the library!
Revolution
It began so simply. My plan was to gather up all the random piles of books that have accumulated round the house and put them in their proper places in the library. Easy de la peasy.
Thing began to go awry when I realised how many books were piled around the house and how little shelf space I have in the library. Which is to say - none.
Also, I had quite a few books - thrillers, romances, proofs that I didn’t ask for and am probably not going to ready - that didn’t really need shelving properly. I’m going to read them once, maximum, and then pass them on (or throw them away, though I confess I’ve not yet been able to do this to a proof. I wait til I can give them to someone who can also publicise them or who would definitely not be able to buy them, so that I’m not depriving the author of a sale. The rest - I really don’t know what I’m ever going to do with them. Maybe they’ll form my funeral pyre).
So - some kind of “just passing through” accommodation for them. There are three empty shelves at the bottom of my husband’s nugatory fiction section. Perfect.
Some of the books in the piles I have read but want to keep. They can go behind the “just passing through” books. Amazing. I am problem solver extraordinaire.
That does leave quite a lot of books still to be housed, though. There’s the secondhand copy of Brian Jacques’ Mossflower that Sarah Perry (yes, that Sarah Perry! She is my writingest friend) insisted I buy when I mentioned an idea I had for a new book. There’s the sequel to Lady’s Knight, which was just a joyful read last year and for whose next instalment - One Knight Stand - I have been champing at the bit and which I bought last week. Then there is lots of historical fiction that I have accumulated, a number of books about plants that I have started to accrue as I move into my Garden As Well As Reading Era and a proliferation of other stuff that is all wonderful but which I have lost track of and need to get organised in my head as much as in the physical realm, so that I know what I’ve got and where I want to go next.
So that’s when I have the bright idea to get not just the piles but the random bookcases - Billys from Ikea, odd-sized secondhand ones crammed here and there, the one from my childhood bedroom now in the hallway, a Globe Wernicke I had a rush of blood to the head and spent proper money on years ago when I saw it in an antiques shop and just had to have it - involved.
They have been filled over five or so years since the library was ‘done’. Unalphabetised fiction and non-fiction mixed together, all genres, all sizes, new and used - a cornucopia but past a certain point the serendipity offered mutates into confusion and a certain creeping panic. I need to get to grips.
