Not that you'll care, but...

...as I am a book fetishist* and a compulsive list-maker, I feel the need to inform the world that today I swapped these old books:

Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, by Patricia Erens,
Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video and Culture, by Sharon Sherman,
The Man with the Dancing Eyes, by Sophie Dahl, and
Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video by Tom Schroeppel,

for the following:

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel,
Dubliners, by James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce,
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf, and
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg.

I plan to teach Konigsburg to my middle school class during graduate school. My only hope is that I won't be held fully liable if one of my seventh graders decides to either a) run away indefinitely to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or b) grow up to direct a series of esoteric films featuring outcasts and narcissists (see Wes Anderson). This book inspires that kind of thing; it's effing fabulous.



*Yes, a book fetishist, and my case is innate, incurable and acute. When I was four I filled my Radio Flyer full of books, alphabetized them, and tried to check them out to friends and family; I even made my own little check-out cards and card pockets. In college I majored in English and am now pursuing a Masters in high school language arts education, and I'll probably go for a certification or second Masters in Library Science. And when I die, I'll either ascend to a heaven stacked high with poetry and prose, or descend to a hell fully stocked with science textbooks and how-to manuals.
Or I'll be reincarnated, and rise again as Orlando.

Yes, books.