kaberett | that was, perhaps, predictable (Reply)

So rydra_wong does a pretty good line in dragging me into tiny non-fictional fandoms. Most recently I have tripped and fallen into reading about the Barkley Marathons.

Obviously, I decided the correct course of action would be reading The Book written about the first n years of their history. And there was a copy at Oxfam! cheaper than from eBay, even! Fantastic, thought I, and kept that tab open, and settled down to browse through ... all ... of the food-and-drink books. And to double check my To Acquire list. Because, you see, Oxfam has a flat postage fee for ordering any number of items from any number of individual shops (assuming you're not ordering anything they want couriered), so it makes sense to get Several Things. Totally.

Possibly it could have occurred to me that what with the Barkley Marathons being very much in the national news I might not be the only person who had had this thought, and nonetheless I was surprised when I went to check out and the book that had kicked this whole endeavour off... had been bought by someone else.

But, well, at that point I'd got a stack of six other books plus one CD for A, so...

(The books: Nature's Palette; Gaia's Garden (don't remember which of you I saw mention that but pretty sure it was one of you); something else by the author of the book on psychosomatic illnesses I mentioned yesterday and have subsequently finished, the penultimate chapter of which further complicated my feelings about... everything... so I'm now second-guessing this purchase in particular; The Beckoning Silence, by the Touching the Void dude, i.e. another special interest via rydra; Tamarind & Saffron, even though I haven't actually read my last charity shop cookbook yet, because I know what I like and I appear to be precisely its target audience; and Sally Rooney's Normal People, which I borrowed digitally from the library some time ago and have Many Feelings about and wanted to own a copy of.)