I recently confronted an interesting conundrum. On a brief, 4 day, visit to Dublin I decided to send a portion of my Irish library to myself in Sydney. Between one thing and another it turns out that it’s really cheap to send 5 kilos of books and starts to get rather pricy if you want to send more.
This raised the question of what were my most valued books, by weight.
Thus while my Concise Oxford English Dictionary is valuable to me, weighing in at over a kilo it displaced far too many other works to make the cut. At the other extreme, even the lightest of my ‘Holy Bible’ collection was never likely to be scheduled for transportation.
[Some readers will be surprised to learn of my scripture stack. As I see it; if the Gideon Society give me their stuff it would be rude not to accept it. Taking their gift saves the next occupant of the hotel room from reading the thing and after a while you get a paper pile that can be useful for packing material, origami, or fuel.]
My 5 Kilo pack was made up of Carl Sagan, Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins works, but the real question for you, gentle reader, is; what would you take with you? (I feel this owes something to the last page of H. G. Wells’s ‘Time Machine’ which I may send in the next 5-kilo instalment).
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3 comments:
Calculus - James Stewart
Keeping Nyala in Style (Sylvia Murphy)
I'm done.
Why read a book twice, It's like going back to the same place on holiday. There are just So many more books and so many more places.
I would be sure to include my old copy of Peig Sayers (as Gaeilge) so I can remind myself that I will never have to read that shite ever again! Apart from that, a few odds and ends by Shaw, McGahern, Wilde et al. ought to do the trick.
Greatest Hits of Hustler vol. 6, 1990-2000.
No wait, that's not right. Umm.. Douglas Adams?
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