On Vox: Introducing: Weekly Wednesday Waffling
After having a browse through my books, on LibraryThing, I realised a couple of things. One is that I have quite a lot of books. Not as many as some, but I'm still 24, I've got time. The second thing that occurred to me is that I have a pretty good memory for when and where I acquired my books and the general stories behind me picking them up.
So I thought it might be quite interesting to do a little experiment! Entirely scientific, obviously. (Go away, Ben Goldacre, I know I'm not doing it right.) I call it 'Weekly Wednesday Waffling', for want of a better name, and because it alliterates.
Each week I'm going to use a random number generator to select one of my books from LibraryThing. I'll post the book here and talk about it in some way, shape, or form. I may or may not have read the books I post, but that's not really the idea; instead of reviewing, call it 'the story of a bookshelf', if you like. Which you probably don't, because that's kind of a lame name. Let's move on!
The first number... 113!
The Outsider
Albert Camus
And as quickly as that, Albert Camus' The Outsider takes the stand.
I picked it up in January 2007, in my third year of university, and it was the first book by Camus that I picked up (I've since read, and very much enjoyed, The Plague).
Only, there was a bit of a snag.
Unfortunately, the year before, I'd taken a module called 'Law and Literature', which was an interesting enough course, but it was by taking this that I blighted my future Camus-related happiness.
We were set a variety of reading one week, and among the photocopies was an extract from The Outsider. I was quite interested by this, as I wanted to read it at some point; I assumed we'd been given the first chapter, or something towards the beginning, which would surely serve to whet my appetite for the full book.
It was after I'd dutifully finished my reading that I realised that I'd managed to read the last chapter of the book. This was our sadistically chosen course reading!*
So now The Outsider was effectively spoilered for me by over-zealous education, and I didn't have the heart to read the full book until I'd forgotten the impact of that one chapter.
Picking up the story of me-and-The-Outsider, though, I've realised that I pretty much have reached that point. I can't remember what I was so upset about all those years (four, count 'em) ago. This is one of the benefits of having a truly appalling memory for plot details; it's hard to spoiler things for me on a permanent basis.
So you can probably expect to see this being read in the not too distant future!
* Oh fine, the lecturer probably wasn't being intentionally cruel. I suppose it might be time to forgive, if not forget.
Originally posted on jentastical.vox.com