even as i feel happy to be home i can't help being cross about the state of my bookshelves. extremely cross. while i was gone my dad has been putting books on them any old how. LOTS of books. some of which books i don't even approve of. i am hideously, inflexibly, compulsively taxonomic when it comes to shelving books. i mean, i put labels on my bookshelves so that it is crystal clear to everyone exactly what goes where. i do not want bloody recipe books and photo albums next to my kunderas. and if i've labelled my shelf contemporary poetry in english then that's where i want my macneice and thom gunn and anne carson and d.j. enright, i don't want ishiguro on it i don't even particularly like ishiguro. and certainly stephen leacock and ogden nash belong together, but i don't think they have the slightest business trespassing on contemporary european fiction i have a shelf labelled american humour for that reason. and some how an entire collection of 18th and 19th century novels - flaubert and turgenev and hardy have migrated off the pre-20th century fiction shelf, and made it onto twentieth century american. and hell's bells far too many austens - i am quite sure i didn't buy the austens - and anyway she is not a contemporary continental classic. and i can't find my essays shelf anymore there's all this stationery all over the place. and somehow catullus and richard powers and a volume of henry james's short stories have appeared on the biography and letters shelf. oh oh oh it's maddening. my pa just came into the room and i accosted him and requisitioned the entire supply of sticky labels in the house. let me get some sleep and get over my jetlag for now. when i am myself again i intend to remove ALL items from my shelves and then begin the reshelving operation. in the mean time i shall devise an even more precise and uncompromising system of categorising books. scowl and sulk.