BiblioAddict The First Step on the Road to Recovery

On work, woman, Waters, and Wells:

Oy, did last week do a number on me.  I travelled, I trained, I worked, and worked, and then worked some more.  Somewhere in there I managed to eat and sleep, but only just barely.  I think I’m juggling entirely too many balls, which I have just taken a step toward rectifying.  I’m hoping to begin posting more than once or twice a week.  We’ll see how that goes, but as usual I make no promises especially since I was just promoted to a new position that might keep me after hours several nights a week.

I’m still reading when I can, though.  Though I should have finished it weeks ago, I finally polished off Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography.  I hope to have my post up some time this week, but if it takes me a while to get to it, suffice it to say that I would not be surprised if Woman turns out to be the best thing I read in 2010.  It was that good.  I’m tempted to say that the second-to-last chapter that debunks the popular old trope that “men hunt and women nest,” courtesy of evolutionary psychologists, is the best one in the book.  That would be a lie, however.  Everything about this book is wonderful and enlightening and, frankly, empowering.  Last year, I read Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science which I also loved.  It was my favorite nonfiction book of 2009, and I found it hard to believe that it could get any better.  I was wrong.  I loved, loved, loved Woman.  As a matter of fact, if I didn’t have books due back at the library in a few days, I’d be reading it again.

Speaking of library books, since polishing off Woman I’ve been devoting some time to Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger since it’s due back at the library in, oh… three days.  And I’m only on page 147 of 463, and I refuse to return it until I’ve finished it because it’s finally getting good darn it.  I confess I was a little at a loss with where Waters was going with this story.  I purposefully didn’t read detailed reviews of this book since I wanted to come to it as fresh as possible, though I knew enough to know it had something to do with a haunted house.  Yet, there I was – a hundred pages in and I didn’t know nothin’ about no haunted house.  Then about twenty-five pages ago things started to pick up, and ten pages ago things got delightfully creepy.  Now I’m very intrigued and refuse to put it down.

Still, I’d better do some speed reading in the next few days.  I really want to finish The Little Stranger, but there are other people waiting on this and I’d hate to hold up the queue.  Sigh.  Library deadlines get me every time.  I’m entirely too slow a reader for a two week deadline.  Unless I want to be inundated with fees and library patron guilt, I end up rushing to get to the end.  Me, I prefer to savor.  But, it is what it is.  Besides, it was free, wasn’t it?  There are few things quite as wonderful as reading a new hardback while keeping $25 bucks in my pocket.

Don’t get me wrong, I love buying books.  But I have finally been forced to admit that I just can’t afford it anymore.  And I’m proud to say that I haven’t bought a book since the beginning of the year.  I’m pretty sure that’s a record for me.  I’m even more sure that the fact that I was next door to a bookstore four times in two weeks and didn’t go in is even more of a record.  Not only did I not go in, but I wasn’t even tempted to.  Progress!  I know the book business needs all the money they can get these days, but the rate at which I was buying books, you’d think I was trying to save bookstores with my measly pocketbook.  It would be nice if I could, but I can’t and this gal needed to learn to prioritize.

Of course, it’s not all that hard to make the switch from buyer to borrower when I can patronize the NY Public Library, which has arguably the best collection in the country.  I’ve learned that it’s dangerous for me to browse, though.  In bookstores, I’m (usually) restrained by the amount of money I’m willing or able to spend.  Usually, I’m not walking out of there with any more than three books.  But the library.  Oh, the library.  I can check-out twenty-five books, you say?  For free?  For real?  *rubbing hands together* Nevermind that it would be impossible for me to read them all before the due date.  That is neither here nor there. So nowadays I go in with a plan.  As a matter of fact, I go in when my books are placed on hold.  I go in, get them, and try to look around as little as possible.  Looking around is the road to madness.

I also started Wells Tower’s collection of short stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.  This book has been lauded up one side and down the other, and I must say that after reading the first story, “The Brown Coast,” I’m suitably impressed.  It is indeed, “electric” as one reviewer described it.  It’s energetic and bounces off the page like a caffeine addict.  I’m very interested to see if the middle stories live up to the promise of the first one.  I also hope that Wells Tower is his real name.  For some reason, I think it’s very cool.  When I first heard it, I just knew he was a famous author.  Lo and behold this is his debut book, though if his writing is as good the critics say I suppose fame is not too far off after all. Well, back to reading I go.  I have a novel to devour.  Oh, the things I do for pleasure…

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