My Bibliographic Obssession

Pierre Auguste Cot,  "Young
Maiden Reading a Book."

I love books. New books, old books, slightly used books. I love the smell of freshly printed ink. I love the way old pages turn yellow and musty. I love reading a novel for the first time; I love revisiting old favorites. There are some books I've read hundred times. I love tiny, local book shops with their obscure titles and large used-sections and all the other random, unique trinkets you can find there. I love huge bookstores that overwhelm me with their quantity of glossy volumes and sterile shelves. I love reading outside in the summer, I love reading by the fire in the winter, and I love reading during any season at a coffee shop. I love love LOVE LOVE books.

Unfortunately, I rarely have time to actually read anymore. That said, I still possess an ever-expanding library of texts, novels, references, anthologies. This past weekend, one of my friends was heading out to run some errands, and asked if I wanted to come along. I replied it depended on what her errands entailed...as soon as she mentioned, "There's a book I've been meaning to buy," I was sold. We went to the closest bookstore, and I bought six new books: Stephen Hawking's special 10th year anniversary edition of A Brief History of Time, Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, Joseph J. Ellis’s Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Nujood Ali and Delphine Minoui’s I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, Troy Taylor’s The Haunting of America: Ghosts and Legends of America’s Haunted Past, and a recently released novel from my favorite author (Juliet Marillier): Heart’s Blood. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into the knowledge, adventure, and righteous anger contained within these books. I imagine reading Nujood Ali’s assisted autobiography will thoroughly piss me off. Not surprisingly, I happen to have a huge hatred for the whole institution of child-marriage in certain areas of the world.

I also recently joined a book club, mainly because they made an offer I could not refuse: if I joined, I could purchase five books at 99¢ each, and then one book at $4.99, plus free shipping. Half of the shipment came in yesterday, to include another book on Tarot, a book on dream interpretations, and a novel of Victorian-era aristocracy semi-historical fiction. I’m pretty excited, as you can tell. While I would love to ramble on and on about my new books and gush over how fabulously smooth the new pages feel as I flip through them, I have class in about fifteen minutes and need to grab my textbooks for that. If I get a chance, I may write a review of one of my new books. We’ll see. No promises.