It has been 7 weeks since my rash decision to not only not buy textiles for a year, but to also buy no books. My friends have been doubtful that I can do this. Reasonable. I buy books. I own books. I also, thankfully, read books. 45 more weeks to go.

Strangely, it hasn’t been hard. At least not yet.

I’ve acquired the Libby app, which I must say, I love. I’ve been reading NYRBs that I don’t own, and listening to books as well. I feel a bit bad it took this long. I’m afraid to calculate my usual annual spend on books, mostly paper. I suspect that while I have bought fewer in the past four years of PhD, I have bought significantly more expensive ones, (thank you, springer and routledge, for ensuring that tasty knowledge only falls into the hands of the wealthy).

Speaking of rage for the insanely expensive academic book, I needed to access a springer book on an anthropological study of spirits ($179.95), which resulted in me acquiring a UT Austin Courtesy Borrower card, which cost me $55 (because I was in a rush and didn’t have weeks to wait for the city of Austin to give me something that will make it free. ok maybe I wasn’t in that much of a rush, but I was. If you know me, you get it.)

So now I have the Libby app, and another local library card. UT Austin has a lot of libraries, I could drown. But I am trying to refrain from walking the stacks for the glorious serendipity because I have only a few more months to finish writing up the PhD, or my head will explode like old sci fi tv when I hit the perimeter.

As an offset to the PhD, I read a lot of mystery novels, mostly bought at the local Half Price Books. I refer to them as the ‘sorbet course’ and I forget them as soon as I have read them, but I have also spent two hours not thinking PhD, and it’s a bit like sleeping, but no stress dreams.

Strangely, I’ve been craving books about/by artists and their practices. I have a few shelves on this, so I am slowly starting to read some I had not, and re-read some I had. In the absence of creativity — at the point the phd is purely instrumental — reading about it, whether craft, art, creation, ways of thinking, or simply looking at images, seems to be doing something for me. It makes me hungry, and it helps me dream of a future when this thing is done.

I’ve been reading Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects, which has a quality of moving between images and words that I resonate with. For most of my life I was more attuned to words and movement (dance), than visual art, but then something changed in the past years and I am also far more interested in visual arts than I used to be, I hunger to understand more. First, the scaffolding, but then, the specifics.

I’ve also been reading Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, which is…odd. It has a lot of ‘my favorite painting or work by this artist is X’ and I really do wonder why, when describing the art made by women over the centuries, she needed to go into Artemisia Gentileschi’s rape or Camille Claudel’s guy problems. Even though she wants to put the history of female artists back into our minds, she still centers men, in many instances. Also, she does not much mention where all this information comes from, and so I wonder who the art historians are that kept all of this knowledge alive. That aside, I am still enjoying the short histories and images.

I think I have actually read more books since the ban, and I have been in several bookstores without needing to buy books. (Though I did ask Wayne to buy me a $5 used kids book in a record shop in Wimberley last week. Did that break the rules? Maybe.)

Frankly, I hope this becomes a way of life rather than a blip. In concert with this, I have been trying to downsize the books. Today I took about 60 books to HPB, and they gave me $22.00. This exchange so annoys me I would rather give the books away. I know they will sell them for a lot more, and that this is how they make money, but it feels so unequal. Why not a dollar a book? Why pennies? Don’t they know pennies are over?

My Austin neighbourhood has a lot of little libraries, so today I snagged a book from there. I would say that I as of yet feel no pressure or sense of loss about not buying books. And even those that I am saving in my phone (by taking photos of their covers) do feel like they could wait til later. I may be a bit late to some of the books, rather than reading what is just out, but what’s a year in the grand scheme of things?

I took my $22 and bought two months worth of coffee filters and three lottery tickets. I figure if the books bring me a million dollars, that is a fair exchange! Never happens though, I am never a windfall girl, I always get offered the work to generate the money. But as my Russian friends say, hope dies last. I hope Santa brings me some books.

So here we are, I’ve bought no books, I’ve wasted your time with this ramble, I am reading about art and dreaming of making things again, things beyond words, but I am still trapped in the spin cycle of thesis words with a few months to go before I am ejected into the sky. I’ll use my saved book dollars to glue together some wings, and hope to get neither too close to the sun nor to close to the sea when I make my break into mid-2026 and the light-loaded futures I desire.