My afternoon.

Okay.

So I knew that I owned a copy of Lamplighter (which I want to re-read before Factotum) and a copy of The Explosionist (which I want to re-read before Invisible Things).

What I didn't know was where they were.

I suspected that they might be up in the attic. So I headed up there.

Thirty-five boxes later, I'd unearthed a TON of old friends (that includes books that I've owned but haven't gotten around to for so long that they've become old friends): Lois Duncan and Connie Willis, Denise Mina and a pile of Soho Crime, the unauthorized biography of 90210, the Days of Our Lives Complete Family Album and The Mabinogion, Jeff Vandermeer and Daphne du Maurier and Noel Streatfeild, two entire boxes of P.G. Wodehouse and three of comic books, Joan Aiken and Eva Ibbotson's romances and Andrew Vachss and Dirk Gently, two or three copies of pretty much every Barbara Michaels book ever, Isaac Asimov and H.L. Mencken and David Levithan and Edgar Wallace and Jim Thompson.

And THREE copies of Foundling. I kid you not.

But I persevered, and in the thirty-sixth box, I found my copy of Lamplighter.

What I didn't find, after box forty-three AND searching all of the bookshelves, was The Explosionist. So I decided, well, the hell with it: If I can own three copies of Foundling, I can own two copies of The Explosionist.

I bopped over to Amazon, and was ABOUT to order it... but then I had A THOUGHT. And I checked Book Closeouts. Lo and behold, there it was, for $6.99.

SCORE.

I mean, of course then I had to add another $30 of books to the order so I could get free shipping, but... YAY!

(Josh, in case you're wondering, was not particularly impressed by my logic. But I placated him with books I dragged down from the attic: a collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's supernatural stories and the aforementioned biography of H.L. Mencken.)