Overdue

I took a break from working on Sunday to check my library account. I had eight overdue items. Eight.

I took as a sign that I should take an elongated halftime from Stephen King. I'll be back for him.

Meanwhile, I seem to have joined another book club. And this one is not messing around. There are lawyers in it. They are very organized. There are rules. And protocols. It is almost too much for my warm and cozy English mind.

We are reading Player One: What is to Become of Us. It is kind of like the "24" of books, only it is five hours long (short?) and no Keifer Sutherland. So far everyone is lonely and fixated on time - which is appropriate since it is the apocalypse. The basic premise is: what happens when several strangers are in an airport bar and the apocalypse comes (due to astronomical oil prices).

Hijinks - of the ominous sniper kind - then ensues.

Oh, and it takes place in Canada. Shout out.

Meanwhile, if you want to know what my days are filled with when I'm not blogging, go check this out: Hey Girl Teacher.

"Listening to people tell stories is very soothing. When someone is telling you a story, they hijack the personal narrator that lives inside your head. It's the closest we come to seeing through someone else's eyes."
Douglas Coupland

"I could spend the rest of my life reading" - Malcolm X

I've just now realized that summer is EXPENSIVE.

And fun in the city is EXPENSIVE.

And my bank account is yelling at me like: get thee to a library.

And so I did.

During my blog vacation I spent all my money I don't have, but I also read.

I re-read Plath's The Bell Jar for book club and loved every unstable braying "I am I am I am" moment of it.

I read Mitford's biography of Zelda Fitzgerald where I remembered "the faded gray romance" because who doesn't love tragic beauty and poetry and destructive lifestyles?

Then, for the Fourth of July, I read Marable's biography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention where I delved into the interesting life of a charismatic man full of contradiction.

My brain and bank account are proud of my free reading.

"It is summer time and past time - and I am very young when I didn't care...I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonair; and so debonair."
Zelda

From the stacks...October edition

Nothing silly happened at the library last night. My on-hold books were on the shelf where they were supposed to be. I found a fun new YA comic to read. There was only one person in front of me to check out. It was all so normal. Ho-hum.

I picked up:

1. The Lost Years of Merlin - T. A. Barron
I'm already 100 pages in. It is somuchfun because there is foreshadowing and that just makes you feel like you are in on the secrets of Merlin. Like he gets burned in a fire and then thinks it would be awesome to grow a giant beard to cover up the scars, oh and birds could live in there too. And I'm like...just you WAIT Merlin.

2. Belinda - Maria Edgeworth
Nicola over at Vintage Reads has been reading Maria Edgeworth and do you know who that is? Oh, only an author Jane Austen super loved. That makes it a must-read on my list.

3. Emiko Superstar - Mariko Tamaki
A "fantasy for awkward girls" sounds hilarious especially since it sates my need for comics/graphic novels.

"I have made up my mind to like no Novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, Yours & my own."
Ms. Austen to her sister

From the stacks, August edition

This isn't turning out how I wanted. From the stacks is supposed to show people how awesome the library is. Except awful/hilarious things keep happening every time I go there. It is like when you bring home a new boyfriend and your family is total shenanigans. The libs is my family and all the new patrons flocking to the libs thanks to the recession are my boy/girlfriend(s). I keep wanting to say, "Libs, get it together, people are WATCHING."

Only first I have to say it to myself.

Episode I - my fault
Having finished Mockingjay, I wanted another quick summer read. The madre has been reading both The Passage and Just Kids and let me know that The Passage has a sci-fi element. What? I didn't know that!

I'd had it on hold for ages and ages and it was finally in at the library. Excited, I made a special trip.

Only, grabbing my book from the shelf I came eye to eye with a giant ship. Are the vampires going to be making a sea voyage? That doesn't make sense. And why does this book look well-read, it is a new book. Only it wasn't. Because it wasn't the book I wanted.

But I was already at the library, the book was in my hands, and I felt ashamed that I put the COMPLETELY WRONG book on hold. So I checked it out and skulked home.


Episode II - not my fault
I've been a little distracted lately thanks to a very sickly Rocious. This means my after work time is taken up with either cleaning up vomit, cradling a Roc, or traumatically taking her to the vet. On my way to pick her up from an overnight observation, I stopped at the library to return overdue books and pay my small fine.

Please note: I don't mind paying fines. I consider them a donation to the libs; however, I do mind rudeness when I am overwhelmed with nervousness about Rocious while also trying to do right by the libs.

There was a long line when I got there. I waited patiently (although nervously because every minute that ticked by was another minute Rocious was in kitten jail) as people checked out, a woman payed a $14 (wow) fine, blah blah blah and finally it was almost my turn. The woman in front of me was checking out one book. The lib employee (not to be confused with my favorite lib man who is awesome and very speedy and I always try to brighten his day with jokes because I know people get angst-y at the libs) said to her, "I could move the line quicker if more were like you and they didn't have fines."

Then I approached 100% ready with everything to return and pay my fine. I tell him this is what I want to do and he says to the woman next to me, "See? Like this."

WHAT?

This transaction can be incredibly fast. But not when I hand over my books to return and they are slowly entered into the computer, slowly sorted, and one by one taken to three different sections behind the desk. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I am waiting with my card ready because I know it is needed to look up my fine. Then I am waiting with my money out while slowly the clipboard is brought out to mark down my transaction.

And yet it is me, the person who wants to give the library money who is in the wrong. I didn't realize I am only allowed to go to the library to check out one book.

Thanks library. After smiling and being polite to your mean employee I'm now going to go pick up my cat who hates the vet so much that she doesn't eat there, pees on herself when they try to put her in her carrier, and then is so despondent that she doesn't even cry on the way home (which I know she hates). I'll then hover around her wiping down her fur and imploring her to do anything besides morosely stare at me. Then I won't sleep because I'm constantly vigilant in case Roc decides to start eating. Because I somehow believe something I have done is killing my cat.

I got home only to realize there were two other books due that day which would be overdue the next, but I was too busy wrenching my cat's mouth open to force-feed her appetite stimulant to care that I would redo this entire experience again.

Maybe next time the libs employee will get me to cry.

"Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of the library."
Barbara Tuchman

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

From the stacks...June

While I love owning books as much as the next bibliophile, I am also a huge supporter of libraries since if we don't use our libraries, we will lose them. And I can't have that.

Eva, at A Striped Armchair, posts her Library Loot every week. While I've posted about libs shenanigans and lib selections, I never thought of making a button for it!

So now I've made my own Chicago specific button, and when I go to the libs I will post what I snag. Maybe it will make you want to stop by your own libs. Perhaps my library selections will even tell us something about me...like that I'm drawn to pretty book jackets...kind of like how I'm drawn to jazz hands...


Sometimes I choose library books by what Amazon tells me I would like (judging from my prior purchases). This is how I came to go find the following at my libs.

1. The Photographer - Emmanuel Guibert. This graphic novel chronicles a photographer's experience of heading into 1986 Afghanistan with doctors without borders. The format is half photographs, half illustrations, and 100 percent interesting.

2. Fallen Angels - Walter Dean Myers. This novel tells the tale of one man's experience in Vietnam. I don't know if I will be able to handle the violence and death, but it is one of 100 most frequently challenged library books...which means I must try it.

"Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them!"
Arnold Lobel