So the hurricane has come and gone, and it was nowhere near as apocalyptic as the weather reports were making it out to be. I stayed bundled up in the house most of the day, watching Day Watch, reading a good chunk of the excellent Eisner / Miller and another stretch of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. Late in the evening I ventured out again to return some DVDs that I’d picked up for Laura which, unfortunately, stubbornly refused to work in our DVD player, and swing by the Harvard Bookstore to pick up a copy of Umberto Eco’s On Literature which I’d noticed lurking on their bargain racks last week.
This is one of those times when I’ve bought a book and brought it home, only to suspect that I’d bought this book before. I know I’m on my second or third copy of the Eagleton mentioned above, but I think this is my second copy of On Literature – either that or I’d read through part of it at a bookstore someplace, decided I wanted it for my library, and then abandoned it because it was, at the time, too expensive for my then-budget. God bless the bargain bins; even if it is my second copy of the book, eight bucks is hard to mourn too keenly.
My favorite part of the book so far is an essay about influences, which Eco wrote and presented himself at a conference about Borges’ influences on Eco. (That had to be a somewhat dizzying experience – to attend a conference about your own work. “Yep, no, unh-uh, that’s interesting, they gave you a Ph.D. for that?”) In it, Eco lets slip that as of that writing, his personal library exceeded some forty thousand volumes.
Forty. Thousand.
Heh. I have some catching up to do.