Car boot sale

This afternoon I worked a bit more on my malignant melanoma, in-between bouts of frantic spring-cleaning and completing the cat's asymmetrical haircut. I thought the neighbor's cat Sid ( we call him Sid cos he's vicious) was laughing at him, and I couldn't be a bad mum.
I have a wardrobe full of black clothes to sell, size 10/12, some barely worn at all.

What will I do with them if I decide to propel myself onto the other side of the Atlantic? And the three million books? And the fluffy feline? And the two huge mirrors, and flea-market finds? And the ten sets of 100% Irish linen bedsheets? I'm a classic case of being tied down by my possessions. Sometimes, I wish the house would burn down so that I would have to start from scratch. Ok, maybe only my room, or it wouldn't be fair.
It's the dilemma that keeps me up at night. Especially before I fall asleep, and also between 2 and 5 am, when I have to be up in an hour's time and I should bloody well get some sleep. What to do, what to do; so much to leave behind, ten years of loves and life in London, a lot of learning, in front of me a straight enough, if narrow, path. Reliable people and places. Comfortable grudges and complaints. Well-worn habits. I know what to expect of winter and where to go for a good falafel. I know the buses that never run on time and the leaves that are the wrong kind on the tracks. I have made mine the pop culture references, even if anterior to my arrival here. I know what's going on. I know which TV station is coolest, even if I never watch TV. In fact, I know what's cool. I feel at home in pubs and cinemas and on the streets. I blend in, not too much, just enough. I look like I know where I'm going. I display the right code to the right kind of person. I'm a purposeful Londoner. This is home. How do I start all over again? I've tried making lists of what I'd leave, what I'd lose, what I'd gain, what I'd risk. They're so long, all of them. This is so scary and exhilarating.
Maybe a bad case of grass being greener on the other side.
Maybe a chance at getting the jigsaw together.


Vanessa inspired me with her list of 'books I've read'.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice (x4)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights and all the others, too
Camus, Albert - The Stranger I even taught it for four years
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers and all his other ones
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved - and all the others
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find and her other ones
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide at least 5 times, including at school
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple (x5, and the sequel,,and all her other books)
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (x4)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son


I tend to read everything by one writer before moving onto the next.
All the books listed above are for sale.. Bargain: buy one item of black clothing from me, get a classic for 1p, how's that?

Where is this list from again?