Recommend: No (But I do recommend strongly Gleebooks Blackheath!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When city people ask \u201cwhy Blackheath?\u201d, it\u2019s a fair question. We don\u2019t climb. Neither of us particularly like the cold. I can\u2019t drive. I love Harris Farm. \u201cDo you have family there?\u201d No\u2026 \u201cDid you grow up there?\u201d No\u2026 \u201cCan you work from home?\u201d No\u2026 \u201cDo you commute every day?\u201d Well no\u2026 I rent in the city for the week days\u2026 Taking in the facts, the jury would deem moving to Blackheath a poor and expensive life decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The truth is, said in the same dreamy whisper as one might confess \u201cI followed a boy\u201d, I followed a bookstore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For a joyous period during my time at university, Gleebooks Secondhand operated out of a perfectly sized and perfectly stocked rectangle shopfront in Glebe. It was located where \u2018nice\u2019 Glebe and \u2018naughty\u2019 Glebe intersect. Sometimes you\u2019re harassed here by iced-up homeless people (they really could be more polite). Sometimes you see David Roberts waiting for a bus in front of the deli (while breathlessly chanting to yourself: don\u2019t do the emu dance in front of him, don\u2019t do the emu dance in front of him).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then\u2026 one day\u2026 nothing. No books to peruse. No books to buy. No books to load into a bulging backbook and be dragged back to Randwick on the 370. An empty store. A unsatisfying promise to relocate to the main bookstore on Glebe Point Road. And no bookseller. Where was Stephen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At this stage in our life we didn\u2019t know Stephen\u2019s name. And how could we have known his perfectly curated and attractively priced book selection, since relocated to Blackheath, would coax us to buy a house there on that chilly, foggy ridge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Girl With Green Eyes<\/em> came from Stephen\u2019s personal collection and was gifted to me on account of my enthusiasm at buying as many disintegrating second-hand Muriel Spark novels as I could. It is a great honour to receive not only a recommendation but the actual book resurrected from the shelves of a page-sensi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was the novel like? It doesn\u2019t matter, really. The delight is entirely in the receipt of the physical item itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Girl With Green Eyes<\/em> is actually a sequel but thankfully it also works as a standalone. Its narrator is the infuriating Caithleen. She\u2019s religious, she\u2019s stupid, she winges incessantly. Oh, and she\u2019s Irish. So, essentially, she\u2019s like every HR manager, bulging out of colour-coordinated activewear, that sits in front of you chirping \u201cgrand\u201d into a Skype call at 7am on an otherwise silent bus into the city. Caithleen falls in love with an unsuitable man \u2013 he\u2019s taking a break from his marriage to an alluring American; or, in a more modern reading, I would suggest he\u2019s just unsuited to her because he\u2019s interesting. The plot of the novel is Caithleen falling over herself to secure from him commitment and security. More often than not she makes a right fool of herself and expects this poor man to comfort her in the way he would comfort a disturbed Golden Retriever \u2013 with food and attention. \u201cGrand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This elusive man is a far superior character to Caithleen. He is funny. He is self-aware. He wishes to indulge in music and conversation. Caithleen, in unfavourable comparison, contributes nothing to society or capitalism. Edna O\u2019Brien is dead now, so I\u2019ll never be able to ask her if this is what she intended, or if the glare of the modern age has completely shifted where the audience\u2019s sympathies lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O\u2019Brien is a good author. Her plot twists just enough to remain interesting without straying from comfortingly domestic. Her secondary characters are superb. Her kind of landlady, Joanna, is from an Eastern European background and I loved how she would gruffly proclaim, \u201cMine Got!\u201d Caithleen\u2019s father is an unsavoury but pitiful drunk who does seem to want the best for his daughter. There are also some lovely descriptions of an Irish country manor that is hidden amongst pine trees and fog. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Girl with Green Eyes<\/em> is a pleasurable read. There really are some beautiful pieces of atmospheric prose, like this small description of the boat going from Ireland to England:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The gulls flew slowly with us, their screaming unwinding the scream inside me. By degrees, the sky darkened; a mist rose from the sea; the stars lit up. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n While I personally don\u2019t recommend this book because the story has dated and the main character is insufferable, I adore that I had it recommended to me. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n When handed too me, Stephen warned that I would likely be the last person to read this book. It\u2019s currently held together with an unholy amount of sticky tape that closely resembles piecemeal schoolbook contact. That\u2019s a deeply upsetting thought \u2013 that a book may cease and perish \u2013 books, unlike us, are meant to be permanent. I disagree with Stephen. Sure, its spine might be cracked and the corners of its covers snapped off, but I think there is life left in this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Long live Gleebooks Blackheath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The experience of knowing love and of being destined, one day, to remember it, is the common lot of most people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1171,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books","category-reid-all-about-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1167"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1170,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions\/1170"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n