have loaded up my shopping cart with books in the last few days. yesterday i snaffled a secondhand copy of colette's "claudine in paris" (for $4), which bonusly has that pensive bonnard painting i love on its cover (the painting with the brunette girl, head-in-hand, waiting at a table, looking kinda sad, reflective and maybe even peeved, and OK so it's anachronistic to say she is wearing red trakky daks, but i like to pretend she is, like ben stiller's kids do in 'the royal tenenbaums') and stendhal's "the scarlet and the black" for $4, and today i finally bought dave sedaris' "me talk pretty one day" (having been warned off it years ago, i have finally caved in 'cos half of it is about paris, which was the clinching factor for me) and the believer music issue. so that's a lot of reading gear, on top of the new yorker and walkley magazines that appeared in the mail. i skipped straight to the france parts in "me talk pretty one day" while sitting at our lunch table at work, and it was a dangerous thing to be shovelling down spoonfuls of vegie moussaka while laughing helplessly at passages from the book. i felt kinda silly, but it had pushed all my laughing-beyond-dignity-and-control buttons, so i couldn't help it.
then i hung out with my sister, unable to explain why you divide fractions by multiplying them inversely (even my dad gave up, with a cop-out "that's just the formula, no one understands it" explanation). it is always embarrassing explaining to a kid how "important" something is to their learning and yet be all "growed up" and have totally forgotten all that stuff (thus negating your own argument). and then we looked up paris and uluru and er, homebush, on google earth which was a surprisingly compelling yet educational experience. have yet to spot my rooftop though.
the new cocorosie album is really nice.