Tag: library

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Checked Out: Week 2

casual-vacancy-cover-art-hi-resI read a lot of books, and on any given day I’m probably carrying around two or three books with me. In fact, I’m in a library right now, sitting at a table with a book on it (I brought the book here). The book I have with me is Teardrop, by Lauren Kate, and if you recall, I discussed it in last week’s “Checked Out.” I actually haven’t gotten too far in it because I’ve been caught up in two other books at the moment, but I brought it with me because I want to play catch up.

People are usually surprised when I tell them I read more than one book at a time, and routinely at that. They wonder how I don’t get confused with characters or with plots, and I honestly don’t know how I do it. Maybe some of you out there are the same way, but it takes me probably a couple of minutes to get back into a plot and I’m all set. The only way it doesn’t work that way is if I’ve “paused” a book and then I come back to it a long time later. And that’s because odds are that I’ve been through a lot more plots and characters in a multitude of books in-between.

It happened to me last week when I got back into The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling. I hadn’t read the book in about three months and I was thoroughly lost at the spot where my bookmark was. When I get caught in that type of situation I take a deep breath and just go back to the part that makes sense to me and read forward from there. I hardly ever let books lie like that, but sometimes life intercedes. I know. I said the “L” word.

Then there’s the one thing that can make me stop all other books on the spot, when one of my “Top” authors releases a new book and I’m lucky enough to get it from the library or someone gives it to me as a gift shortly after it is released. That happened this week when I bought the new Laurie Halse Anderson book, The Impossible Knife of Memory, with a gift card I received from my mom for my birthday. Oh yeah, and I  bought it electronically to read on my Nook. The horror. Continue reading “Checked Out: Week 2”

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Checked Out: Week 1

Yes, I checked these out.

Okay, so admittedly I’m a book addict. I can’t help it. About this time last year I decided I was going to stop frequenting the library, that the number of books we own that I hadn’t read had gotten so huge that I would instead focus on them.

Two weeks later I was back at the library checking out an armload of books and breathing a huge sigh of relief. I know there are worse things to be addicted to (a lot worse), but I think I know now how crack addicts feel when they’re going through withdrawal. It wasn’t even like the books here at the house aren’t adequate, either. It’s just that I *knew* there were so many more out there, and I had to get my hands on them.

So, this year I’m not even pretending to be a good boy and read just the books here. Sure, I will sprinkle them in here and there, but I’m not going through that whole thing again. In fact, I’ve decided to use some space here to tell you about the books I currently have out from the library each week (they honestly do change from week to week). Maybe you’ll even want to read some of them, and perhaps I won’t even end up reading all of them myself, but at least for right now they’re in the queue, and sitting snugly on the bookshelf in my corner of the living room.

Here’s what I’ve Checked Out this week:

1. Innocence, by Dean Koontz

So, one of my favorite authors writes a book and I immediately seek out libraries hoping to get my grubby hands on it. Sound familiar? Oh, and did I mention that it’s our book club‘s book of the month for January, too? It means even if it wasn’t something I wanted to enjoy myself, now I have to get it done too. Continue reading “Checked Out: Week 1”

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I Did What?: My Sordid Job History, Volume 4

Temple University’s Paley Library

Since I was a six-year old runt trying to keep up with my seven-year old superstar sister, I have been reading books, and lots of them. I remember my mother showing me how to tell what grade level the book was for, and I would always go after the ones at least three grade levels above my own. Of course I wouldn’t always know every single meaning to every single word, so I would have my old red Dictionary handy to look them up. If I didn’t understand the definitions I would see my mom about it, and hope she knew. Otherwise, I would have to skip over them. And the glory of those books was that I could have a plethora of them whenever I wanted. Because that was the same year I discovered the library.

From that point on what I wanted to do was work in a library, but I never thought it would be possible. It seemed to me like everyone who worked in a library had to be middle aged or a woman, and I was neither, so I sucked it up and said it wouldn’t happen. Then I grew up and went to college, a place beyond my wildest dreams that had an incredible library of its own. As luck would have it, my mother’s friend worked in the campus library and put in a good word for me. Before I knew it, I was working the job I thought I would never have, a job in the library. Continue reading “I Did What?: My Sordid Job History, Volume 4”

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Personal Library, R.I.P.

“The room was full of bookshelves, from front to back, from wall to wall.”

I haven’t seen a room like that outside the confines of a library in about a month of Sundays, maybe even longer. It seemed like in another era it was common to have rooms such as the one described by a colleague of mine yesterday. And the house that contained such a room didn’t even have to be a mansion, even though those bastions of civility also had large insular libraries. A regular, standard house in the olden days would have perhaps a converted closet as a book repository, but it was still there. What happened? Continue reading “Personal Library, R.I.P.”

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@ The Library

As I sit here I am inundated with inane conversations from every side. And it’s the one time I can honestly feel invisible. As long as I keep my head down, and as long as I’m looking at my phone while I piece this post together, I will continue to be so. And the things … Continue reading @ The Library