mirror my face where I left it
-a haiku by Bob Boldman
Yesterday (4th September) me and a friend went up to London (I say "went up", she lives in Woodford which I still count as Practically London), to go to Foyles. Following its move earlier this year into what looked like a massive, new (and shiny) store, I wanted to go and delve into books for hours. Which is exactly what happened.
The new store isn't as tall and stretching as I'd expected it to be. The floors are only one small flight of stairs away from each other, hence the lifts need doors on both sides, but although the height isn't there, the depth is. The shelves seem to go on forever, forming a sort of book maze. The first floor is more open and more like a sort of balcony, but seems manage to weave in and out with endless fiction. I've been to so many bookshops lately that buying more prose to read seemed unappealing. I knew what the new books were, I knew which ones were meant to be good and not, and I knew that I had enough to be getting on with already.
We worked through the shop from the top to the bottom which worked very well for this. It meant I was able to pick up books that were stranger and more interesting. And it also meant we had ages to explore the play section, which we could easily have spent a full day at.
I did come away with quite a lot of books. The first of which is The Awesome Story Generator, which is much better and much less useless than all the rubbish internet generators out there. It's simply three different flip options, forming a logline for an often completely random and quite entertaining story. I've no idea if it's ever going to help, but for pure fun and appeal, it was the best £10 I spent.
I then found the Philosophy section, which would have taken me hours to plough through. At the end of this, I discovered a rack of Graphic Introductions, which seemed very appealing, and useful for all kinds of subjects, so I bought ones on Postmodernism, Modernism and Critical Theory, which should all be in some way useful for when I head off to Uni.
Then onto the Plays, which are the most exciting. I was planning on buying a completely random modern play, but I didn't really know where to start. So after much time deliberating, I picked up ones that I'd heard of/read extracts of for my A2 course. Bent by Martin Shearman's an exploration of homosexuals and Auschwitz, which looks awesome. And the first production starred Ian McKellen, which is even more awesome. The second play is Edward II, because I felt I needed more of a classic. I'd read an extract of this last year, and was amazed by how bold Marlowe had been for the time - so I think I ought to give the whole thing a read. I know the conclusions to both plays (neither happy), but I'm interested in finding out what happens before that.
The final two purchases stemmed from books I'd intended to buy before I went there. I'd originally planned to buy Philip Larkin and Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems - and was very close to buying the latter. Eventually though, I stumbled across The Haiku Anthology, and bought that instead. It's lovely to have a collection of haikus, as they aren't poems that people generally come across through investigating poetry online. They're not quite as dramatic as some of Ginsberg's Haiku's (which you can find online, and which are really powerful and modern), but they capture the spirit of what Haikus are meant to be. They also explain the different forms of the poem - which up until yesterday I didn't know existed.
The only prose I purchased is something I had intended to buy - Crash by JG Ballard. Controversial, dramatic and strange - so the perfect book for me. It was also inspiration for one of the best Hurts' songs, so I couldn't really say no.
When I eventually work through the plays and Crash, I'll review them on here. I may blog about the Anthology and highlights from the Story Generator - but there's a lot less to write about comparatively. I'm pleased I was able to find different books that will be useful, but that I already have some sort of interest in. I've looked for Bent in every bookshop for about a year, so it was great to find it at last. I have really high hopes, for that especially, so I hope it lives up to them.
It was great to be able to rekindle my love for plays, most of all. I got slightly obsessed with them during Year 13, but then over the very long summer break, I've got bogged down in prose. Not that that's a bad thing - but it's easy to think that prose is the only, or the main, element to literature, when it really isn't. There's so much more, and plays are an exciting part of literature for me, so I'm very glad to have rediscovered them.
And so many of them as well.
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