If there was anything good to come out of lockdown, which there wasn’t, it was the fact that many people took the opportunity to clear out their homes of supposed junk. This meant that during my state-sanctioned daily 60-minute constitutional around SE24, there was nearly always a house somewhere on my route were the owners had left a pile of books on the pavement for passers-by to scavenge through. Now, I cannot walk past a box of books without rifling through it, hoping that amid the crap – so many books about coding and old travel guides – there would be an wanted gem. The tiny victories I had in lockdown were a rare source of pleasure in a miserable time.
I struck lucky time after time. There was that set of National Geographic from the late 1990s, which made excellent bathroom reading for most of 2020. When those were done, I found four months’ worth of The New Yorker from May-August 2020, which took me another 18 months to work through, containing as they did many more reminders than I needed of that awful summer of Coronavirus, George Floyd and Trump. More happily, I had wanted to read Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde ever since I’d heard it was being adapted for cinema by Andrew Dominik, and there it was one afternoon waiting for me alongside William Maxwell’s marvelous novella So Long, See You Tomorrow.
I’d also long felt I needed to read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and once more, there it was. And thank god I hadn’t had to pay for it because after three months and 150 painful pages I finally gave it up with considerable relief, placing it rather guiltily on my own garden wall for some poor sucker to take home.
Then there were the books I would never otherwise have read, such as The Dog Of The South by Charles Portes. This had a good cover and promising blurb, and I was intrigued to see that Portes had also written High Noon, but all the same it sat unread on my shelf for a year until I attended a birthday party where somebody gave this very same book to the host as a present. That was recommendation enough for me, and I devoured it in a few days. The novelisation of Wargames? A Jack London compendium? An unproofed review copy of Dan Hancox’s excellent history of grime, Inner City Pressure? Each one found a willing home.
I thought such bounties would end with lockdown but this week I had the finest haul of all. Check a load of these goodies below.
Such a haul, and not even a lockdown to suffer for it.
See you on the other side of summer, when I might have made my way through some of the above.
The Great Wen 