I'm in Prof. Purkinje's guest room, looking at photographs he's taken over the years, and a colorful piece of iguana folk art that my then-partner and I gave him as a wedding present in 1990. There's a picture on the desk of him with another biologist I know quite well. And a tin can is used as a pen holder: he's had it for years, and it alludes to a group joke from our high school days. And I'm pretty sure that another print on the wall is one I gave him 20 years ago.

So naturally, I suspect him of tweaking the decor to make me feel at home. What I don't think he tweaked is the bookcase, which is astonishing to me—not because of the coincidental overlap in our tastes, but because it suddenly hits me how many books I got turned onto through him, when one adds up the high school recommendations to the college ones to those from when we were in our twenties. This isn't even counting my two favorite mystery writers (other than Dorothy L. Sayers, of course), who between them account for a full bookshelf of mine at home, but are not represented here. And then there are the 2-3 books I've actually recommended to him. The overlap is, on the whole, tremendous. Though he has more books, and he's actually read them.

I'm a proofreader. I read slowly. And—let's face it: my eyes are bigger than my eyes. Not that that's a bad thing . . . I hope.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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