Bookstores and credit cards are a dangerous combination and tables marked "50% OFF second book" are icy patches in the road. I know this. I see those icy patches from far off. Do I slow my forward momentum, crawl past them keeping a firm hand on the steering wheel? Ha! I hit them full speed, do a 360 or two or three and find myself at the check out counter with many hundreds of pages to read.
The pile in the pictures is yesterday's loot. This was my conversation with the smart, slightly nerdy looking clerk -- it was a slow time, just then I was the only customer checking out.
I don't know why I can't resist these thick books.
It's the thirst for knowledge.
That's true. But over the years I've accumulated so many kinds of knowledge I don't have anyone to talk to anymore.
I think there's a parabola in acquiring knowledge. It's a very long upward curve and it makes it possible to talk to many more people with diverse interests as you advance.
I feel like I'm on the downward side of the curve where I've got fewer people to share all this accumulation with. I rarely have a conversation about the renaissance or the age of exploration.
Knowledge is always satisfying for itself, like beauty
BIG SIGH! I forked over the credit card and signed the slip. Came home ruminating about Jonas' descriptive after last Saturday's post, "a free range mind." That sounded very good and I think he meant it positively. But I pictured the chickens on my parent's farm long before "free range" arrived as a marketing concept. It was simply farmers grew their own chickens. They wandered about the barnyard, the cow lot and the weedy fields around the chicken house indiscriminately eating whatever bugs they found, whatever worms they scratched up from the ground and whatever hands full of chicken feed we threw to them [cracked corn, various sorts of grains and seed]. They thrived, laid tasty eggs and were themselves tasty when they became Sunday dinner. But they were birdbrains and, essentially food factories.Bo
There are analogies to be drawn. Perhaps those analogies are best left largely unexplored. Meanwhile, I really love fat books that are great overviews of history from one point of view or another. So when am I going to read these book, or the 13 picked up the library book sale last week?
3 comments:
If you're like me (in this respect), it doesn't matter when or if you read them. Just owning them is a tremendous comfort.
June -- Yes, a credit card combined with a bookstore is dangerous territory especially if one is a book lover. A while ago I reduced the number of books that I had accumulated but I do miss them still today. Dilemmas are presented on all levels to book lovers. Forget the credit card and just sit back and read your fine books and enjoy.-- barbara
i have stacks of books in various places, including the car, all in the process of being read, a few pages at a time. some i gulp down, some i sip, some i chew on over and over again. i hope i never run out.
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