Surplus Cats

You know that poster from elementary school with the rabbit sitting in a mountain-sized pile of carrots with Comic Sans letters proclaiming that Too Much of a Good Thing Is … Wonderful! ?

Yeah? Maybe? No? Well, use your imagination and we’ll get through this together and then I will go off somewhere alone and feel old.

That rabbit is me, but instead of carrots it is a stack of books and instead of wonderful it is a tortured nightmare of inner-conflict.

I needed a book about all of the lore surrounding the lives of the Bronte sisters, so I ordered The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller and while I was on the site I pre-ordered Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. I also snagged something from my wishlist that was available on their used Marketplace for an irresistibly low-low price — Futures from Nature, edited by Henry Gee.  Then, while I was waiting for them to ship I made the mistake of stopping in a BN and couldn’t help but pick up Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro.

Of course the Miller book arrived first, and I dove in, and a couple days later, Futures, arrived and after thumbing through it I started that and am almost through it. I really should lock it up and get back to the Bronte research. The Atwood pre-order was released and shipped; I haven’t even let myself open that box.

And, OK, it is wonderful but really, Elizabeth, no more books until after you move.

In obvious non-news: I am going to need a new bookcase for my next place. Do you think they’ll just let me pitch a tent in the library?

Tangentially related: Check out this piece from The Atlantic by Alyssa Rosenberg about the new crop of movies based on children’s books, Scaring Our Kids.  There’s also a lot of good stuff going on in the Newsweek interview Rosenberg links to, with Sendak, Jonez, and Eggers, like this:

What makes a good kids’ story?
Sendak: How would I know? I just write the books. But I do know that my parents were immigrants and they didn’t know that they should clean the stories up for us. So we heard horrible, horrible stories, and we loved them, we absolutely loved them. But the three of us—my sister, my brother, and myself—grew up very depressed people.