Early afternoon, last Sunday - last day before the start of work. It wouldn't be accurate to say that I was feeling apprehensive or oppressed or anything like that, but the imminent commencement was definitely on my mind, and, not wanting to spend all day subliminally frettin' about it all (and having previously decided not to see people that day), I scooted out to Box Hill for a quick browse in the library (hoping for the Stephanie Plum novel that I'm up to) and a longer browse in McLeod's, a rabbit-warren of a secondhand bookstore in the area. The latter browsing turned up a Lurie and a Fowles, both v. cheap (and neither of which I've read), so I was well satisfied with the excursion; on my way out, I spotted a bunch of the distinctive Pratchett covers (well, spines actually) and grabbed The Fifth Elephant too, turning to it for distraction for the rest of the day.
I'm not sure, but I think I've only read it once before (maybe twice at most); truth be told, it's not especially memorable as far as Discworld novels go, but even relatively minor entries in the series are plenty enjoyable.
Actually, there was another factor at work, somewhere in the background, in my buying the book; see, some of my earliest book-buying memories, dating to late primary or very early high school, involve doing exactly that - buying Discworld novels from McLeod's - and I liked the sense that, in some respects at least, things haven't changed. In fact, I've wondered before if those early experiences were the root of the frequency with which secondhand bookstores appear in my dreams - with the possible exceptions of home- and school-analogues, they're probably the most frequently recurring settings...it's not as if I haven't spent more than my share of time in the things in the years since then, but somehow the ones in my dreams often have a flavour of that first exposure to them (especially since there was a hiatus of a few years between the visits to McLeod's and the subsequent picking-up of the habit via the usual city, Fitzroy, etc haunts).
Possibly, too, they represent the hope of finding something new or previously unheard-of - including but maybe not limited to books - for a recurring figure in those dreams involves my wandering into such a shop and stumbling upon a whole bunch of books by a favourite author that I hadn't been aware of (sometimes the author is unspecified in the dream; on at least a couple of occasions it's been Pratchett)...rather tragically - in both senses of the word - sometimes I wake up from those dreams and actually feel a sort of befuddled joy and anticipation at having picked up the books in question and put them on my shelf, ready to be read, before I catch up with events and realise that the discoveries were only dreamt...
