A Thursday Bookish Bullet Point Post

• I have five books that I have read this year that I have not yet written about and I had fully planned to pick one and write about it tonight, but now I find I don't have the mental energy to do so.
• I kind of like the flow of bullet-point posts, it's sort of stream-of-consciousness, so here we go.
• Yesterday I mentioned I couldn't find my copy of Eleanor Pérenyi's Green Thoughts.  Tonight I went looking for something else and guess what? 
• I found it!
• It's a used Modern Library edition and has really tiny print.  It also has an inscription on the first page that reads "from Louise, Christmas '03". 
• I peeked at the introduction but there is no mention of her Ruthenian years.  Green Thoughts, however, is a collection of essays organized alphabetically, and her writing is called "tart, smart and beautiful" which makes me really want to read it now, though I had best wait until I finish my Tove Jansson memoir.
• Did you know that Modern Library has a whole series of gardening books?  That could be really dangerous to know, I fear.
• I am not a gardener, unless there is such a thing as "armchair gardening", but I do have a little project I am going to work on that has to do with herbs in a container.  More about that later.
• Whenever I go looking in my book room for a book I know I own, I always (always, always, and I try hard to make myself Not do this) come away with a small stack of "rediscoveries" (ah, this book looks really good, how did it get relegated down here to my bookroom . . .?) that all of a sudden I must have close at hand.
• Are you curious what a few of those titles might be? 
• I was looking on my nonfiction shelves where I have lots of travel narratives as well as nature books and women's history/memoir type reads.
• The Olive Farm by Carol Drinkwater.  I read one or two of her books (including this one) year's ago and now I have this overwhelming desire to read all the books she has written about her olive farm in the South of France.
• Oh, I do wish I could click my heels together and wish myself away.  I would wish to go to the South of France.  Or maybe sunny Italy.
• Sigh.
• Anyway, I had to go back today I find out which of Carol Drinkwater's books I actually own.  Not, of course, that I plan on ordering the books I am missing.  Okay, maybe that is sort of what I had in mind.  I have four books, so I think I am missing a few, but I haven't gotten so far yet as to see which are the missing books.
• Annie Hawes?  Have you read her books set in the north of Italy?  I love her books, too.  I have at least three and have read at least two of them.  I could happily reread her books as well.  Hmm.  I wonder if I am missing any of her Italy books?
• Riding in Cars with Boys by Beverly Donofrio, just because it caught my eye and is about a young woman who becomes pregnant as a teenager in the 60s as part of her rebellious youth but when on to an "elite New England university".
• May Sarton's Journal of Solitude, which I have also read, but she has been on my mind and it caught my eye--rather the word solitude did.
• Diana Abu-Jaber's The Language of Baklava, because I seem to be drawn to memoirs and this one sounds good.
• Rosemary Mahoney's Down the Nile, because doesn't that sound warm and exotic.  It is subtitled: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff.
• And then I added Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein to my pile, because spy stories have been on my mind.
• I still think I am going to attempt a summer of spies, but we'll see.  I always think about doing this but then end up not reading very much.  And I have loads and loads of books that would fit very nicely.
• So maybe to put myself in the mood, I have picked up Decision at Delphi from my "set aside . . .temporarily pile".  I was almost 400 pages in when I got distracted and set it down.  What a shame to let it go so close to the end through no fault of its own.  So, now I am reading it again.  With this book I am being both bad and good.  You wonder how?
• I have picked up Another book to read (even as I am reading too many, but enjoying each one very much), but not actually adding something new to the pile, since this was really sort of there anyway . . .
• And then I looked at all the books by Helen MacInnes that I own, and I think I must own nearly her entire backlist of books.  I had better get to work reading.  That could be a whole project all its own.  And so, she is one of my "must read everything" authors.
• I am nearly finished with about three books and I am hoping that by the end of the weekend I'll get to choose a few new books and can add those three to the finished and enjoyed pile.
• Not really to that end, but just because this is what I always do (though it tends to be a mental list, and this time it has been a paper list) I have been jotting down titles that sound really good to me at the moment. 
• I think it's a very good thing that at least all the titles I have jotted down are books I already own.
• I have been on a book buying binge (mostly with gift card funds) and so I am adding more books to those I own, which always feels a little like it is back pedaling.
• As I type I am listening to the wind shake my windows.  It has been a cloudy, cold, blustery day.
• First I got caught in the rain.  Why do I bother with using an umbrella when the wind makes the rain pound down on me at a nice wet slant?
• Then I got caught in hail.  It was just pea-size but still not much fun being pelted by frozen peas. 
• Luckily I was just a few steps away from my bus shelter.
• Needless to say I was cold and wet and cranky when I arrived home.  My feet were chilled and when I have chilly wet feet the rest of me is pretty cold, too.
• And now I want to go tuck myself in bed with my Helen MacInnes book and my day's mail (which includes at least one postcard and a few bookish shaped parcels).
• Oh, and that pile of books?  Now that I have satisfied myself that I can look longingly at new reads without actually starting ever more new books (but they are so close at hand just in case), I will likely put nearly all of them back.
• I probably won't manage to put them back in the right places and they will be a jumble and it is a reminder of how much I really need to organize my bookroom.
• But that is a project for another day!