Reading

You would think someone who majored in English and is studying to work in a library would have tons of books but I don't. I have a decent stash at home, but it never occurred to me to bring any with me here. It's never really been a problem, but on Sunday night I was really desperate for something, anything to read.

Besides my textbooks, the most interesting of which is called Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, I have only two books. There's the Everything Bridesmaid Book (thanks Janet!) and an atlas I bought when I was in England because I didn't know where anything was. I really wanted to get all those European countries straight in my head. Monday night I resorted to reading the atlas. It seems I'm just as geographically stupid as ever. As a child, I used to play with a globe. I thought the names of some of the foreign places would be beautiful names for my children one day. Kenya and Australia were two of my favorites. Unfortunately I don't remember anything useful.

I finally made it to the library yesterday where I got Heave and a Sue Grafton mystery novel. Every once and a while I crave a good mystery, but I'm not really a mystery fan. So I always think back to my Women and Detective Fiction course to identify good authors. As a result, I've only ever read mysteries by women.

I started with the Sue Grafton book. On page 3 there was a greasy thumbprint halfway down the page near the spine. I tried to read the page but my eyes kept traveling down to the thumbprint. It was driving me crazy! I tried putting a piece of paper over it, but I still knew it was there. I finally gave up after I had read the first sentence seven times. I've read books in much worse condition, so I don't know why this bothered me so much. I guess I started thinking that if the last person who had this book was the kind of person to leave a disgusting thumbprint, what else might they have done with this book? It made me think of the episode of Seinfeld when George goes to a bookstore and takes one of the books with him into the bathroom. The bookstore makes him buy the book because he had it in the bathroom. Later he tries to return it, but is told the book has been flagged as having been in the bathroom. He tries to donate it to charity but they won't take it either. I can't wait to deal with crazy book shenanigans like that when I work in a library.