I have great affection for bookshops and libraries. This may sound odd, but when I’m in them I sort of get the tingles. I love running my fingers over the titles on the shelves and furtively sniffing at a book or two (I do this with crayons, too). I like rummaging through the bargain tables because this is where I find my great buys and because, sometimes, I can be a bit niggardly. I go into spasms just thinking about the abundance of information contained in said spaces—all keys to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. (I love all kinds of information. Nothing is trivial to me. I will get the same kick reading about how the cosmos was built to reading how a pencil is made.)
So I went to the bookstore to relax and ended up buying a couple of books: Jane Austen, A Life (for me); A Million Little Pieces (for Mom because I know she’s curious to find out what the whole Oprah hullabaloo was all about), and The Glass Castle for Lola because it looked interesting enough. I can never walk out of a bookstore without buying something (the same way P cannot walk out of a CD shop without a purchase, which is a sad, sad thing when one is trying to save money) even though I still have a lot of books lying unread at home and, well, even though I read books for a living.
