The Riveting Life of a Full-Time Bookworm

Who might have thought sourcing and downloading PDFs would be a whole-day-ordeal? Had you asked me yesterday morning, I would have been inclined towards disbelief, quantity depending. Today, I feel quite differently.

I love books, physical books in particular; I love their feel and smell and character; their very presence is enough to cheer and keep me company on a slow day indoors or a venture into the world alike. My desk is stacked with them––thick dictionaries, literature histories, grammar books; books on Classical rhetoric and mythology; Mary Beard's SPQR from my first semester; the Norwegian translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, John Keats' poems, more Ovid, more Cicero, an old edition of the Iliad also in Norwegian. My bookshelves, too, overflow. As a student, I depend on them, and privately, I love to admire and collect them. Old books, new books, special and first editions… I have three individual copies of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and am tempted to buy another. There exists no such thing as "too many books." Without books, I am nothing.

There is, however, one defining characteristic of theirs that, in the case of the student's lifestyle commuting between home and university, can be regarded a flaw, or at the very least a substantial downside: they are heavy; and though I do not consider myself an exceptionally weak person, I am afflicted with an unfortunate combination of disabilities and other chronic conditions that render me unable to lug a mountain of books back and forth on a regular basis. It also does not help my case that many of the books required for my studies are veritable bricks and, therefore, especially cumbersome.

To remedy this issue, I am an enthusiastic visitor of Anna's Archive. Her extensive shelves are an indispensable supplement to other digital sources such as JSTOR and the Internet Archive, my University and National libraries as well as local ones. Ours is a symbiotic relationship. I might write her a card for Valentine's and leave it on the homepage.

I peruse the database, referring to the syllabi as needed. A perfectly brewed cup of tea sits at my side. Classics from Papyrus to the Internet, Ancient Greek Literature, Latin Literature: A History, A Companion to Catullus, A Martial Reader, Ars Amatoria Book One––the list goes on. Everything runs smoothly, until it doesn't: Download failed. I retry. Failed. I try again. Failed. I try a different file. Fail. A different server. Seventeen minutes of waiting. Fifteen, fourteen… Fail. I lose track of time. My tea is long cold. I try and retry, jumping from one link to another until, finally, Brill's Companion to Ovid is secured. I move it carefully into the correct folder.

Now, all that remains is filing them in Zotero…