The scent. Always the scent for me, of books and books and books, stacks of books, rows of books, piles of books, old books and new books, fiction and non. Breathing in deeply and feeling so at home among the dusty, papery smell of all the books.
The muted busyness of the library. The quiet calm of yesterday's libraries long passed. The murmur of conversation, the click of computer keys, the beep of the computer scanner, the laughter of children.
Overhearing the conversations: "Have we seen this one? I think we've seen this one." "Can I get another, Mommy? Just one more?" "That's his latest one. Did you read the one before?" "We don't have it but can get it from the main library." "If you like the Weepies, you'll like this one."
My books on hold, treasure just for me, I quickly find, and move to the shelves that always have the newest books, then to the stacks by letter, looking for this favorite author, that favorite author, always searching for that new book I can't resist.
Shelves of books, chaotic rainbows of book spines, hypnotizing me as I walk up and down, looking for the book I seek. So many books I've read and so many yet to go.
My library card in hand, burning like a credit card with no limit, and I am so tempted by all the books, the many many books, that I reign in my need to just check them all out--I can't carry them all.
A long line waiting to be checked out by a very-black-haired, many-pierced, way funky librarian, not named Marion, but Josh.
Finally my turn with my precious pile of books. Josh lets me know I owe $4 in overdue fines from my last fix.
A small price to pay.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
About books
So it's that time of year when I just want to find a book to fall into and into and into and that book would never end. Like when I was a precocious kid on summer vacation and all the grownup books were new to me and I'd read anything, good or bad, and something long or with multiple volumes was the best book book of all.
And I didn't and don't care if it's great literature or pulp fiction.
Especially in summer, I don't care. So the summer I discovered Harry Potter was a good summer then another year it was Ron Faust and another it was A Series of Unfortunate Events
This summer I'm searching, I read Playing for Pizza and that's good but short and I've read most of Grisham anyway. I think about re-reading an old favorite but I already re-read ...And Ladies of the Club last winter and I'm not in the mood for Gone With the Wind.
I'm lusting for something new when I catch a wisp of buzz about a new book in a series about vampires, not a subject I'm particularly interested in but something in the reviews catches my interest and I order a used copy from Amazon, my favorite way to acquire a book cheap, especially when I suspect the hold list at the library stretches into the next decade.
So Twilight comes and thank God it's a week with not much going on, because suddenly I've fallen hard and can't quit, I just can't quit reading. The story opens its covers and invites me in and it's like I've been bitten--I step into this new world and don't want to leave.
And when the first book is done I'm dying for more, so I say casually, let's got to Wal-mart, we need a couple things. And he thinks I mean paper towels and orange juice, and I what I really mean is Eclipse and New Moon and Breaking Dawn.
The stack of three books on the table calms me as I think of the pages and pages before me and I start the first one and disappear. I read when I have a minute and I read when I don't and I read when I wake up in the morning, I read in the car, I read til 3 a.m., I wake up tired and don't care. Because I just want to keep reading. I read like I am 12 and the only obligation I have is my chores and if I don't do them my mom will. I'm not 12 and I have to go to work and it's a temptation, a horrible temptation to bring my book to work with me and read instead of work, but I resist, my inner grownup is in there somewhere.
So I read and read and read and I want to finish, no I don't -- I don't want the story to end. I don't want to turn the last page. Yes I do. Of course. Is it why I like books? They can end tidily, as this series does? With, even, a happy ending?
Maybe so.
How I loved this past week, lost to me in any substantive way, perhaps, as I lost myself in that fiction-world. Who knows how long until I find another story or another author who will invite me into a place I don't want to leave? Yet I know, I will.
And I didn't and don't care if it's great literature or pulp fiction.
Especially in summer, I don't care. So the summer I discovered Harry Potter was a good summer then another year it was Ron Faust and another it was A Series of Unfortunate Events
This summer I'm searching, I read Playing for Pizza and that's good but short and I've read most of Grisham anyway. I think about re-reading an old favorite but I already re-read ...And Ladies of the Club last winter and I'm not in the mood for Gone With the Wind.
I'm lusting for something new when I catch a wisp of buzz about a new book in a series about vampires, not a subject I'm particularly interested in but something in the reviews catches my interest and I order a used copy from Amazon, my favorite way to acquire a book cheap, especially when I suspect the hold list at the library stretches into the next decade.
So Twilight comes and thank God it's a week with not much going on, because suddenly I've fallen hard and can't quit, I just can't quit reading. The story opens its covers and invites me in and it's like I've been bitten--I step into this new world and don't want to leave.
And when the first book is done I'm dying for more, so I say casually, let's got to Wal-mart, we need a couple things. And he thinks I mean paper towels and orange juice, and I what I really mean is Eclipse and New Moon and Breaking Dawn.
The stack of three books on the table calms me as I think of the pages and pages before me and I start the first one and disappear. I read when I have a minute and I read when I don't and I read when I wake up in the morning, I read in the car, I read til 3 a.m., I wake up tired and don't care. Because I just want to keep reading. I read like I am 12 and the only obligation I have is my chores and if I don't do them my mom will. I'm not 12 and I have to go to work and it's a temptation, a horrible temptation to bring my book to work with me and read instead of work, but I resist, my inner grownup is in there somewhere.
So I read and read and read and I want to finish, no I don't -- I don't want the story to end. I don't want to turn the last page. Yes I do. Of course. Is it why I like books? They can end tidily, as this series does? With, even, a happy ending?
Maybe so.
How I loved this past week, lost to me in any substantive way, perhaps, as I lost myself in that fiction-world. Who knows how long until I find another story or another author who will invite me into a place I don't want to leave? Yet I know, I will.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
About 'the salad days, the halcyon years'
From "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen (Algonquin Books, 2006):
Today--how was it for you? Did you drag your butt out of bed, slug your coffee, and settle your butt into your office chair (or where-ever), calculating how many hours until lunch, then until home? Was the highlight of your day when the email came around that said "come get donuts"? Did you have to go to your inner happy place (for hours) as you plugged away at your computer? Did you just need to crash when you finally got home, exhausted by...not much of anything?
Maybe you're not getting enough salad.
"Water for Elephants" is about the circus, about a young man who leaves veterinary school to, literally, run off with the big top, and his months with the menagerie and the performers and the workmen change the course of his life. I'm thinking maybe it's easier to have a grand life when your past includes an elephant named Rosy and a chimpanzee named Bobo.
I'm feeling a little gray--it's been foggy for two days, and raining some of it, and I really miss the sun. Lent starts tomorrow, and when you work in a Catholic environment, you know that means six weeks of everyone "giving up" something--they really take that "fasting and abstinence" seriously. And, the groundhog saw its shadow last Saturday. Remember how long I thought January was, and that it might be a good thing?
Well I was wrong.
I did really enjoy "Water for Elephants" -- it's really fun to discover a new writer you like. And you know what? I get to go to New York City again next week! Oh, and March 1--it's only 24 days away! Meteorological spring!
Yea I'll talk myself out of it.
How about you? How halcyon are your days?
Those were the salad days, the halcyon years! The sleepless nights, the wailing babies; the days the interior of the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane; the times I had five kids, a chimpanzee, and a wife in bed with fever. Even when the fourth glass of milk got spilled in a single night, or the shrill screeching threatened to split my skull, or when I was bailing out some son or other -- or, in one memorable instance, Bobo -- from a minor predicament at the police station, they were good years, grand years.Isn't that what we wish every year could be? "Good years, grand years." Do we know these "salad days" while they are happening? Or is it only from the vantage of time -- as the narrator is an old man, looking back -- that we realize how "halcyon" our days have been?
Today--how was it for you? Did you drag your butt out of bed, slug your coffee, and settle your butt into your office chair (or where-ever), calculating how many hours until lunch, then until home? Was the highlight of your day when the email came around that said "come get donuts"? Did you have to go to your inner happy place (for hours) as you plugged away at your computer? Did you just need to crash when you finally got home, exhausted by...not much of anything?
Maybe you're not getting enough salad.
"Water for Elephants" is about the circus, about a young man who leaves veterinary school to, literally, run off with the big top, and his months with the menagerie and the performers and the workmen change the course of his life. I'm thinking maybe it's easier to have a grand life when your past includes an elephant named Rosy and a chimpanzee named Bobo.
I'm feeling a little gray--it's been foggy for two days, and raining some of it, and I really miss the sun. Lent starts tomorrow, and when you work in a Catholic environment, you know that means six weeks of everyone "giving up" something--they really take that "fasting and abstinence" seriously. And, the groundhog saw its shadow last Saturday. Remember how long I thought January was, and that it might be a good thing?
Well I was wrong.
I did really enjoy "Water for Elephants" -- it's really fun to discover a new writer you like. And you know what? I get to go to New York City again next week! Oh, and March 1--it's only 24 days away! Meteorological spring!
Yea I'll talk myself out of it.
How about you? How halcyon are your days?
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
About books about dysfunctional people
I finished a book last night called The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls. (Read an interview with her here»)
The best part about this book was, I ended it feeling as if I were the best parent ever. Because, for all the eccentrically wonderful nuttiness of Walls' parents--her father giving her a star for Christmas, her mother waiting to name the newest baby until exactly the right name became evident--the gross neglect and passive physical abuse of these children made me want to cry through most of it. I just don't think allowing a three year old to make his or her own dinner on the stove, resulting in terrible burns, is anything except child abuse.
They lived most of the time in poverty and squalor, and if they learned self-sufficiency and inspired make-do cover-ups (like inventing her own braces), they also learned as they grew up that their parents did not learn from their mistakes, even as they encouraged their children to make and learn from their own.
And interestingly, three of the four children emerged relatively unscathed from their childhoods--her sister, a artist, her brother, a police officer, herself, a writer and journalist. Their youngest sister, the delayed-named Maureen, seems to be the one most closely resembling their flawed parents.
I always disagree with Dostoevsky--unhappy families nearly always share the same reasons for being unhappy: alcohol, drugs, mental illness. And I'm not sure there are many "happy" families; there are only fully or partially functioning ones, ones that manage illness and upset, loss of jobs and loss of life, and are still talking to each other, having Thanksgiving dinner together, laughing with or at whatever it is that's in their way.
Well, what about you? How dysfunctional are you feelin'?
The best part about this book was, I ended it feeling as if I were the best parent ever. Because, for all the eccentrically wonderful nuttiness of Walls' parents--her father giving her a star for Christmas, her mother waiting to name the newest baby until exactly the right name became evident--the gross neglect and passive physical abuse of these children made me want to cry through most of it. I just don't think allowing a three year old to make his or her own dinner on the stove, resulting in terrible burns, is anything except child abuse.
They lived most of the time in poverty and squalor, and if they learned self-sufficiency and inspired make-do cover-ups (like inventing her own braces), they also learned as they grew up that their parents did not learn from their mistakes, even as they encouraged their children to make and learn from their own.
And interestingly, three of the four children emerged relatively unscathed from their childhoods--her sister, a artist, her brother, a police officer, herself, a writer and journalist. Their youngest sister, the delayed-named Maureen, seems to be the one most closely resembling their flawed parents.
I always disagree with Dostoevsky--unhappy families nearly always share the same reasons for being unhappy: alcohol, drugs, mental illness. And I'm not sure there are many "happy" families; there are only fully or partially functioning ones, ones that manage illness and upset, loss of jobs and loss of life, and are still talking to each other, having Thanksgiving dinner together, laughing with or at whatever it is that's in their way.
Well, what about you? How dysfunctional are you feelin'?
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
About pandemic flu and small children's colds
Now why, on a beautiful September morning, would I spend one minute thinking of pandemic illness of any type? Hang with me.
The little girls are staying with us this week while their parents are on vacation, and the bubbly chaos they bring is fun and exhausting. Their chatter is often hilarious and their need to snack voracious.
The bad news is, they both have colds. The runny nose-and-coughing kind of colds that kids seem to get one after another all winter long, from the time they are babies to the time they are about, oh, age 10. (The age 10 number is not pulled from thin air, but rather from my vast experience of raising two children who had one cold after another, all winter long, until the aforementioned age.)
So we are spending the week feeding and playing and wiping the runny noses and giving out medicine.
The colds they have are not an influenza pandemic, and that's not why I was thinking of one.
Our book club met last night, our first meeting of our season, and I was the presenter of our first book--The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry. I also pitched this book to the group last spring, when we were choosing books for the year, and the ladies agreed that it would be a good addition. A lively discussion ensued.
The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was terrible: it struck young people the worst, it killed off the soldiers who had just survived The Great War, it killed quickly, usually of pneumonia, and it spread quickly around the world.
Could a pandemic happen in the 21st century? The reading I did suggests it could, but the effects of the flu might be very different--we understand better about the way disease spreads, we have better medical care, and hopefully, we learned something from past pandemics. We'll see, I guess. I keep washing my hands.
I'm expecting a small epidemic at my house. Those little runny noses are just leaking viruses. Just how immune is a 51-year-old to the miasma of viruses being spewed about? Stay tuned.
So, how about you? How's your immune system holding up?
The little girls are staying with us this week while their parents are on vacation, and the bubbly chaos they bring is fun and exhausting. Their chatter is often hilarious and their need to snack voracious.
The bad news is, they both have colds. The runny nose-and-coughing kind of colds that kids seem to get one after another all winter long, from the time they are babies to the time they are about, oh, age 10. (The age 10 number is not pulled from thin air, but rather from my vast experience of raising two children who had one cold after another, all winter long, until the aforementioned age.)
So we are spending the week feeding and playing and wiping the runny noses and giving out medicine.
The colds they have are not an influenza pandemic, and that's not why I was thinking of one.
Our book club met last night, our first meeting of our season, and I was the presenter of our first book--The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry. I also pitched this book to the group last spring, when we were choosing books for the year, and the ladies agreed that it would be a good addition. A lively discussion ensued.
The flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was terrible: it struck young people the worst, it killed off the soldiers who had just survived The Great War, it killed quickly, usually of pneumonia, and it spread quickly around the world.
Could a pandemic happen in the 21st century? The reading I did suggests it could, but the effects of the flu might be very different--we understand better about the way disease spreads, we have better medical care, and hopefully, we learned something from past pandemics. We'll see, I guess. I keep washing my hands.
I'm expecting a small epidemic at my house. Those little runny noses are just leaking viruses. Just how immune is a 51-year-old to the miasma of viruses being spewed about? Stay tuned.
So, how about you? How's your immune system holding up?
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