Recommended Reading

I went to Barnes & Noble tonight, again. I don't think I should even try to remember how many times I've gone this semester alone, since it would only come across as sensational and excessive. I feel almost more at home in B&N than I do in my own apartment...and I'm not really exaggerating that much when I say that. Tonight, I ran into a friend who admitted she'd "book-raped" a borrowed paperback and was looking to replace it with a new copy. She was having difficulty finding what she was looking for, so I expertly pointed her to the right shelf. Yeah, I don't work there, I just should. I became even more convinced of that idea when the checker who helped me at the end of my visit informed me that employees get a 30% discount. (That should have come as no surprise, since my boyfriend works at the B&N on campus, but me being the only-half-here-at-all-times person that I am, I reacted with astonishment. "Wow!") She then told me nudgingly, "We're hiring for Christmas!" At this point, I started to feel a little creeped out. Has she been watching me? Does she happen to know that I go in there every other day? Or do my book selections and Member card exude enough nerdiness for her to try to recruit me? In any case, I'd love to fill out an application, but I already have a job. Too bad for B&N.

Not that they don't benefit enough from my, ahem, regular visits. I'm just a bookworm, that's all there is to it, and since this semester I have a few hours a week free for that sort of thing, naturally I feel like I need to buy four books a week to keep up with my insatiable book consumption. Well, anyway...

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"...What would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that book lovers have more fun. Persons of Letters have to read things like Candide or they're a few letters short of the whole alphabet; book lovers, meanwhile, can read whatever they fancy."
--Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt

I have, in the (not so distant) past, expressed embarassment over my reading choices, and while all in good fun, I've decided that there's really no need for that kind of thinking to come out of this blog. Plenty of people really are restricted in their book/movie/music choices because of this idea that they need to have "good taste" or be "well read" or whatever. Apparently, the hope of impressing the heck out of other wanna-be Persons of Letters is worth a high price to them. (Candide? Blergh.) Ha. I say we read, watch, and listen to things because we like them. So no more joking about hiding things on my bookshelves, I'm just going to throw it all out there shamelessly, as if I'm singing alone in the shower (which I actually don't do, oddly enough. Maybe I should. It seems like singing in the shower is the type of thing which would make one a more well-developed person all the way around, but there is something about the sacred privacy of the shower that always renders me unwilling to disturb the peace and quiet. Besides, I can't ever remember the words to any songs.)

So my latest accomplishment, in the pleasure-reading business, was Ann Brashare's lovely novel The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. When I bought the book, I was suspecting that it might end up being some kind of cheesy cross between The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (overrated) and The Babysitter's Club. (Considering my pessimistic outlook, you might wonder why I bought the thing. Don't ask the question. I can usually offer no sufficiently rational reasons for the books I buy. I'm just, er, intuitive like that.) To my surprise, this book, while certainly directed at teenage girls, isn't cheesy at all. It treats its characters, and therefore its readers, like real people who just happen to be female and fifteen years old. It isn't a deeply philosophical treatment of the tragedy of the human condition, but neither is it some kind of naive "BFF! Girlfriends rock!"-type trash. Instead, it's a very believable, real-life story about girls who could be the ones down the street, and it recounts their stories with humor and sympathy. It isn't escapist, really (the girls deal with issues like divorce, broken relationships, and terminal illness), but it's a hopeful book, and one you put down feeling like it was definitely worth the time. Or that's how I felt, anyway.

Current Project: Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident (because, like every self-respecting fantasy, Artemis Fowl is a series of indefinite length) by Eoin Colfer