My Blog

I just got side tracked today in Carrefour in Wangsa Maju into piling up my supermarket cart with books instead of groceries – you know, the essentials of every day living: victuals and such for the table, for making the house livable and clean. This little English penguin, with its stamp on the spines of these books stacked, without any categorization or any order, one atop the other, into bins, beckoned me from afar with a large cardboard sticking up from them : $9.95 per book.

Thoughts of food for the table, for the cats, the CD-Rs for backing up my PC files – they all got dumped into my own later bin at the back of my head. My cart rolled in a beeline towards the card board sign. I delved into the pile and I lost track of time, my stomach forgot to tell me to be hungry, and it was way past 3, and my cart is piled high with remaindered Penguin books.

More than two hundred ringgit worth of them came under the cashier’s check out light later, and that same amount went into my credit card account. Only back at home did I remember I had forgotten something: the really essential things I was supposed to pick up.

Among these food for reading I got all the copies of Evelyn Waugh I could find, several short story collections, including ones by Malcolm Lowry, F Scott Fitzgerald, Manchester’s City Lights magazine, Penelope Lively, poetry collection by Patrick Kavanagh and a Penguin Poetry collection with Roger McGough and two others, English Romantic Verse, prose collections by Virginia Woolf and Allen Ginsberg.

Next time I’m going back to Carrefour to get the stuff I forgot this round – and which I would probably forget again, and would come back, again, with more books.