Hello, blog. It's 1:20 a.m. on a Friday night/Saturday morning, and I'm sprawled across the bed still fully dressed with a book, my laptop, and a full tub of cheese balls that I won in a guess-how-many-cheese-balls-are-in-the-tub contest (it was for charity, okay?). It feels like a good time to come back to you.
Over the past few years of my undergrad education, I've become more accustomed to telling people that I'm an English major and expecting that knowledge to immediately help them fill in some details about me, my educational goals an easy heuristic for my other skills and interests. Yes, I'm a words person, and if you know what I mean by that, so are you: I read (novels and the New York Times, food blogs and style blogs, political analysis, poetry that doesn't always rhyme, and tweets upon tweets) and I write (mostly papers, sometimes blogs, occasional opinion articles, and tweets upon tweets) and I give a fuck about Oxford commas (maybe too much). My freshman year, I brought a dozen books to school with me, and came home with over seventy, and a sore back from carrying them down the stairs in my residence hall. I find it appalling that in a fire, paperbacks would be the first casualties. I also wear glasses that make me look like a junior librarian, because surprise: reading under the covers with a flashlight as a child tends to make you nearsighted.
Unsurprisingly, I'm also a library person. I remember, in those halcyon childhood days of near-endless time to read, amassing piles of Babysitter's Club books from my town library's used book sales in the dusty, airless basement. When Sweet Valley High and the Boxcar Children ceased to satisfy me, I went upstairs and checked out stacks of Nancy Drew books and anything by Paula Danziger from the Young Adult shelf (unfortunately, singular) before exhausting the supply and moving on to J. D. Salinger and Oscar Wilde, all the while totally disinterested in the dog-eared copies of mass-market romance and sci-fi novels that comprised the remainder of the basement book room. It took about ten years and an electrical explosion to get me back down there, but it was ultimately worth the time in between.
I got a job when I was 15, scooping Italian ice for the odd customer or two who wandered in almost by accident during my four-hour shifts, and predictably exhausted my meager paychecks on book binges. Barnes & Noble's bargain book bin sales were cause for excited emails (hellooo, early 2000s) with my best friend about exactly which titles sounded promising, and my bank account and the U.S. Postal Service both rue the day I realized how cheap and easy it was to buy used books on Amazon. Still, I spent more than I care to admit on clean, fresh paperbacks in those days, savoring the experience of making an untouched novel really and truly mine, slightly (only ever slightly!) bent cover and all. I remember where my books came from better than I remember where I buy my clothes, and for good reason: they were bankrupting me.
In May 2010, the Morristown & Morris Township Library blew up -- literally. Some sort of major electrical mishap underneath the foundation of the building caused approximately $1 million worth of structural damage, and the library was forced to temporarily move its operations elsewhere. The weekly book sale, which I'd entirely forgotten about in the decade of my maturation from children's literature to existentialist philosophers, relocated to an unoccupied corner storefront a full half-block closer to my house. I can't remember whether I or my best friend was the first to (re)discover its ill-advertised magnificence, but during that summer immediately following, we both certainly did our part to keep the library's restoration efforts afloat. A far cry from the stifling, asthma-inducing conditions of the library basement, the new space was small enough to feel intimate, but airy enough to let books and their potential buyers breathe. For prices ranging from $0.25 to $2, I bought copies of books I'd read but didn't own, and books I'd judged by their covers and with which I only later read and loved: Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty trilogy, Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Stephen Dubner & Stephen D. Levitt's Freakonomics. In the past two years alone, my personal collection has probably grown by half, thanks to the people crazy enough to donate perfectly intact copies of great books to the sale.
Now that I've filled out most of my collection, I have a tendency to stock up on contemporary literary fiction in near-mint condition whenever I make a book sale pilgrimage, always thinking I'll get around to reading whatever hot new thing is all over the New York Times bestseller lists and be the hit of all the dinner parties (note: this is not really a thing. I don't know anyone who throws dinner parties, and I don't know that I have the manners to attend them anyway). Most recently, I optimistically acquired copies of Nicole Krauss's Great House, Jennifer DuBois's A Partial History of Lost Causes, and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, the last of which was recently shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Of course, I've had less than sufficient time to actually crack any of their spines since classes started, but after an academically exhausting few weeks, I thought I needed to get back in touch with what I love about reading. I'm glad I started with The Art of Fielding tonight, not only because it only took me a single chapter to fall in love, but because I found this upon turning the first page:
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