From the stacks...June II

I've told Jabba that I would read Possession with her. Alas, I have been thwarted thus far (don't worry Jabba, I'm starting the reading online and I'll have the book on Tuesday). First I put it on hold, to HOLD it until I could get to my neighborhood library. Except when I got to my library it wasn't on the shelf and it wasn't on the hold shelf and the library employee hated life and so was not helpful. FINE.

And so I made a specific trip down to Harold Washington Library, obviously checking online first.

I love the library - and I want you to love it too - but sometimes it hates me. Like every time I go to the HW. I've been kicked out. I've been shushed. I've been prodded by security.

Regardless of past experience, I went to the HW...and IT WASN'T THERE.

It is not possible that that many patrons want to read A. S. Byatt.

In a book/library depression I began a literary binge. It was like supermarket sweep except it was me and the fiction section. My choices, like my frantic perusing, went in alphabetical order.

1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I love the dark way Russians, and specifically D write. This book fit my mood perfectly.

2. Middlemarch by George Eliot. Picking this up actually lightened my mood as I remembered that I confuse MiddleMARCH and MiddleSEX. People kept talking about reading MiddleSEX and I kept thinking why on earth haven't I heard about Victorian author Eliot writing about transgenders?

3. Dubliners by James Joyce. I don't know why I got this. Perhaps it is because Joyce is so polarizing that I wanted to read him for myself and decide which side I'm on.

4. The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. This week I reread How I Finally Lost My Heart and fell in love with Lessing all over again. Also, my choices were starting to weigh me down and this was the lightest of the Lessings I still need to read.

5. Death of a Valentine by M. C. Beaton. At the end of the stacks is a row of new fiction. I browsed but nothing caught my eye. But then, I saw Beaton. You can read my friend Beaton in probably two hours and once again be in the Highlands with village constable Hamish Macbeth. The perfect comfort read.


Oh, and P.S. since security always gives me issues I literally hid my current library book in my purse by creating a false bottom so I wouldn't have to explain why I was bringing a library book I had already checked out into the library and then getting more books but not returning the first.

Who knew a love of reading could turn so duplicitous.

"Come, and take choice of all my library,
And so beguile thy sorrow."
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus