Ah Literature

Went to Barnes and Noble today to spend my 40 dollar gift card. For those of you who have never experienced my bookstore psychosis I will describe it for you.

I walk in, usually take a deep breath and comment on how much I love the smell of bookstores, and then begin my perusal. Generally I check out the tables with newly released fiction, then move to bargain books, and then I just wander around the fiction shelves looking for anything that catches my eye. There is almost always a book I want, so I find those first and then I just browse for a good hour. While I'm browsing I find things, and after an hour I generally have a sizable stack to sort through. Now comes the hard part: picking which to put back and which to buy. Sometimes it seriously hurts me to put some books back on the shelf. Which is ridiculous because I have sooo many books on my shelf at home that I have yet to read. But this doesn't seem to matter. So I look at the books, and then slowly talk myself out of all but two. I can rarely only get one book. Today I needed to keep it right around 40 since I have little money of my own. I wound up paying about 7 bucks for the taxes of the books I bought. Not too shabby. The sad thing is that I'm probably not even going to get to these books until I graduate because I'm taking 3 lit courses...but whatever. Sacrifices must be made I guess.

I love reading. I'm truly amazed by it. Reading is one of those things that actually makes me sad when people say that they don't enjoy it. You learn so much from reading. New words, dialects, ideas, points of view. You learn to cry and laugh and think deeply. You make connections across genres and generations. You become good at games like Scattergories and Catchphrase. :) It's really a win win win win win situation.

So go read a book today. I think I'll fall asleep to the lovely Dave Eggers and his Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.