My daughter-in-law Sarah talked books with me back in the spring. She brought a couple of books for me to read, when we were both in Tennessee in May. Then, a few weeks later, I got a heavy box in the mail, with postage of $4.72. I mail packages all the time from here to New York, to California, and nothing goes for $4.72, especially not something heavy. So, it must be BOOK RATE!!!! It was, indeed, books.
The problem with more books in the house is that I’ve already made a few commitments to some books. I’m all the time reading about books, seeing ads and reviews for books, and noticing, for example, books on the best-seller list, like The Girl on the Train, which debuted as a number one best-seller and stayed there for 13 weeks, when it was usurped by Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. I thought I should read about that girl on the train. I put it on hold at the library.
Then I read a review of a new book about Ravensbruck, which is interesting to me, and I put it on hold, too. And I saw a great TED Talk by John Green. I’d already read The Fault In Out Stars and Paper Towns and was interested in reading more by him so I looked at the library’s catalog and put Looking for Alaska on hold.
And then there was this year’s Pulitzer Prize Fiction book All the Light We Cannot See. I was number 37 on the library’s waiting list. Also, in some article about, umm, something interesting, I saw a reference to the book The life-changing magic of tidying up : the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing and wondered if the library had it. Wow. They did. I was number 45 for that one.
Here’s how things worked out.
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- This book was very well researched and very scholarly and very hard to get through. And really thick. And full of information like this: the list of Ravensbruck camp commandants Standartenführer Günther Tamaschke, Hauptsturmführer Max Koege, and Hauptsturmführer Fritz Suhren. Reading through words of titles and places that were so unfamiliar to me made me stumble as I read through each page, and it was taking me forever, and books are only checked out for three weeks.
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- I really wanted to read the book because that’s the concentration camp where Corrie Ten Boom and her sister Betsie were. Indeed, there were a couple of references to them which I found in the book’s very precise index. Here’s how far I got through the book. Maybe I’ll get it again, sometime in the future, when I’ve restocked the tissues and recovered from the grief in the first 20% and prepared myself for how it’s just going to get worse. Meanwhile, I had to read some Lemony Snicket to perk myself up again.
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- I finally got to the top of the list for this one a few days before Peter was coming to visit for several days. There were a dozen or more people waiting behind me on the library wait list, so I couldn’t renew it. I had very low expectations that I could read it.
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- So it went back the very next day. I can try again later. And attempt to get it read before February, when the next Pulitzer will be awarded.
The week after Peter was here, I spent some (lots) of time recovering, then I got a little under the weather and got almost one whole book of Sarah’s read. I’ve finished it now and started on another one. (I’m starting with the thinnest ones, to give me a feeling of success and completion.) From the library, I presently have one video (Call the Midwife, which I watch while I’m walking on the treadmill) one Playaway (a Lemony Snicket, which I listen to while I’m doing housework) and a graphic novel, which I’m reading because reading graphic novels requires a different skill set from just reading words. I read pages and pages of the graphic novel Maus, before I realized that the mice were wearing cat and pig masks. (I forgot to look at the pictures carefully. Isn’t that interesting? There was a time when, as a kid, I was far more interested in the pictures than the words. Now, it’s reversed.) I’m still waiting for the tidying-up book; I’m all the way up to number 10 on the list for that one.
The first step to becoming wise is to look for wisdom, so use everything you have to get understanding.
Proverbs 4:7 (Easy-to-Read Version)
Non-fiction helps me learn and understand. Fiction helps me learn and understand. Books for adults and children and preschoolers help me learn and understand. Thank you, God, that I can read.
I got the tidying book from the library on cd. Overall interesting with some actual tips, but a little repetitious and odd in an Eastern sort of way.
Ollie, Mollie, Gollie! I so should have know that you would have been aware of that book. Maybe it will be better in it’s hard-copy self. Maybe there are lots of pictures.
I am in about the same spot on the waiting lists for some of the very same books. AND I have the same bad habits as you do when reading graphic novels! Even retired, I never seem to be able to make a dent in my stockpile of books to read.
Oh, I so wish you were still here, so we could talk about them together.
Kevin said why didn’t I mention the name of the graphic novel. It’s Gast. And I told him it takes me so much longer to get through a graphic novel because I end up saying to myself, “Okay. There’s some birds in the sky. And some clouds. Now there’s a guy walking into a barn.” I’m trying to be sure I don’t miss something. Fortunately for this book, there’s a girl who’s writing all this down, so every page or so, I can read what she’s written and see what I missed (the farmer, for example, who is really the eggman, but I had overlooked him completely and had to go back and find him and get him into the plot as it exists in my head). I don’t remember Little Lulu and Archie and Veronica being this difficult.