It’s really quite late by my standards, but I promised myself I’d show up here today – all about the doing things for me!

Yesterday I visited one of the local libraries, got myself a library card and set myself loose on the shelves. I’d not been to this library before and it is quite decent!

For a while it was a bit of a jam study** situation – so many, many books that I was paralysed by indecision, but I managed to suck it up and grab just a few to keep me going.

I came back with:
+ The break / Marian Keyes
+ A murder in Tuscany / Christobel Kent
+ BabyBarista and the art of war / Tim Kevan
+ The kitchen diaries II : a year of simple suppers / Nigel Slater
+ The art forger : a novel / by B.A. Shapiro
+ I love Dick / Chris Kraus
+ Silence : (fictions) / Rodney Hall
+ The tree of man / Patrick White
+ Sidney Chambers and the perils of the night / James Runcie
+ Wig out at the Jagbags [sound recording] / Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
+ Mozart’s last symphonies / Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Tognetti, Australian Chamber Orchestra
+ Symphony no. 10 [sound recording] / Shostakovich

Quite unpleasant day at SML, so good to end on a positive note.

xxx

** TL;DR – It all began with jam. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a remarkable study. On one day, shoppers at an upscale food market saw a display table with 24 varieties of gourmet jam. Those who sampled the spreads received a coupon for $1 off any jam. On another day, shoppers saw a similar table, except that only six varieties of the jam were on display. The large display attracted more interest than the small one. But when the time came to purchase, people who saw the large display were one-tenth as likely to buy as people who saw the small display.

I often feel like my life is a series of jam study situations.