More Books Than I'll Ever Read #1: Medea

In the last month or so, I've had to buy about three more bookcases. Almost an entire wall of a not unsizeable room in my flat is now covered with heavily stacked book shelves.

I've lost count of exactly how many books I have, although I will concede that there might be a few doubles there. What is now very likely is that I own more books than I will ever have the chance to read before I die, even of one of those books has within its pages the secret of time travel and enables me to keep jumping back a few years to keep up to date. However, over the next number of .... days? Months? Years? .... I am going to attempt to upload a photo of each book I own, tell a story behind it, and, of course, an admission as to whether I've read it or not, and why. So, clearly, I'm not only a hoarder, but someone who feels the need to clutter up the Internet with my clutter.

This first book, Medea, I have actually read. Not only that, I've read it several times, and made loads of notes over it. This is because I'm directing it for the NVT Brighton in June.

It's a good translaton, by Tom Paulin (of Late Review), and the cast seem to be having fun with it. The inside pages are all scrawled over with lots of notes and ideas that presumably made some sense to me at some point. What's particularly fun is how often I've scrawled a question mark at random moments in the text.

However, as this is my first entry on the subject of books (and those ones I'll never read) I feel I should point out that I don't normally write in my books. For play scripts, it's fairly expected (you can now guess the date of a script mainly due to the absence of a highlighter marker), but with most other books, with the exception of text books, I suppose, it's considered something of a no-no. Presumably it's looked upon as some kind of graffiti. However, there have been times when I've picked up a second hand copy of something or other, only to discover that someone before me has doodled notes in the margins.

It's almost always pleasantly conversational, and has led me to muse that had I ever met the person who had made the notes, we would have probably gotten on quite well (it's clear that we have at least had similar taste in books).

If books are a form of telepathy, with the writer speaking across time and space to the reader, then the notes in the margin are the chatty friend who always has something to say.