Good Timber! and why one keeps one's own library

You may remember that Timber suddenly decided, for reasons unknown to me, to regress in his house-training, and had been peeing in the kitchen in the middle of the night. So for the past several weeks, when I go to bed, I've been barricading him into the bedroom, which is so tiny that if he were to pee in it, he'd have to sleep in it.

Well. Last night--or this morning, rather, about 5:30--he woke me up barking at me. It wasn't a great big loud "someone's there" bark (not that he uses that particular bark much, Mr. Sociability), it was more like the bark he uses when he want me to do something for him, like make Taenzer give him back his ball.

At first I was like, "Oh, Timber, give me a break" and hiding my head under the covers. Then I got conscious enough to think--wait--I bet he has to go--drag your lazy self out of bed and take him out. Which I did, and he peed a river, bless his heart; he wasn't joking one little bit. So even though I was barely awake, I did my best to praise him and tell him what a good boy he was and how proud of him I was. Maybe if we have several repeats of this, eventually I can discard the baby gate, he can have the run of the house again, and Annie can come sleep with us again. (She's too rickety to get over the baby gate any more, and I want her to be able to reach her food and her litter box, so she has to sleep by herself out in the hall. Poor kitty girl.)

Anyhow, I'm proud of my boy. He's a good problem-solver when he needs to be, and assertive when he needs to be.

I'm still reading Nero Wolfes. I think my mother had all of them, and last time I shelved them apparently I lined them up in chronological order--that is, the order they were written. So it's interesting to see things develop--various personalities and so on. Archie goes from being a bigoted and fairly obnoxious smart-ass to being a much smoother and more cosmopolitan smart-ass. Johnny Keems vanishes somewhere and Orrie Cather takes on his particular set of personality traits, like being slick and wanting Archie's job. They start out with Doc Vollmer, but have a different lawyer than Nathaniel Parker. Harry somebody.

The women are pretty much of a muchness, at least until Lily comes along. This is partly due to the shallow and callow reporting of Mr. Goodwin. Things get a little better, as I recall (I'm still in the first half dozen books, written in the 30s), after Lily makes the scene--and who can forget her necking with Nero Wolfe in a taxi!

I wish I knew more about NYC--it would be very interesting to compare the Manhattan described in the Wolfe books to the current city.

I also found a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that I don't think I've ever read (I've never read any of the Little House books, either, though I think my sister had a set), and one of Edie Sedgewick, so I'm set for good reading for a while. Since I'm still hiding out from my troubles, this makes me happy.

I don't buy many books any more, which is a pity. I love books. But even paperbacks are expensive these days, and, believe it or not, there's only one bookstore in this university town, an independent. (Neither is there anywhere to buy magazines--just what's at the grocery store check-out, which is annoying.) I've tried to patronize it, but they don't carry books I'm interested in. They're happy to order for you, but you can get them so much cheaper and at least as fast from Amazon. But because they're so expensive, I don't often order books from Amazon because I can't browse them, and I don't want to spend money on a book I won't like. I used to buy several books a month, but it seems that as the small, independent publishers get swallowed up by the conglomerates, which care nothing about literature and only about dollars, there are fewer and fewer books I'm interested. When I look at my wish list on Amazon, most of them are books to replace books I already have that are disintegrating.

At any rate, I was going to make the point that having one's own library in one's own home means that whenever you have an urgent need to read something, you can be fairly sure of finding something on your shelves to take you away. (which is not a well-constructed sentence...) I have no objection to re-reading books--I have a few books I know practically by heart and continue to re-read anyway because the authors of those books have put their words together with such skill and care and craftsmanship that rereading them is like listening to a favorite piece of music. You can't get tired of it. Eleanor's journey to Hill House, for instance, or H.P. Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space," or Henry Mitchell's garden writing (of course!), Mary Stewart's romances, Andre Norton's Star Rangers which was the first science fiction I ever read and has as firm a hold on my imagination now as when I first read it in jr. high. Or, on a higher plane, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, which was astonishing, a total revelation. I had no idea it was possible to do things like that. I remember the first time I read it, I would read a paragraph, or maybe even just a sentence, and then have to stop and let it reverberate and sink in. It took me forever to read it because I was just so blown away. It doesn't have quite such an impact now, of course, but it's still an amazing read.

I used to wish my "rich anonymous uncle" would die and leave me $100 a month with the stipulation that it be spent on books. I couldn't get quite as much for my money these days as when I first had the idea, but I think it's still a good wish.