Tagged: bibliophilia

Torture! It’s torture, I tell you. I have tonight, tomorrow night, Friday night and Saturday night. Looking at the not-yet-read books I have piled on the shelf, none of them seem short enough that I could start them now and be done with them by Saturday night when I simply must be done with it because I can’t take a book that I’m nearly finished with all the way to the States if it turns out to be one I want to keep, thus meaning I must bring it back again! (Especially one my mother already mailed to me ONCE...

For someone as perpetually busy as I am, a weekend with no plans is both soothing and disorienting. I’m constantly torn between the need to relax and the urge to fill my time. I need the downtime, my shivering soul protests, but my brain won’t stop buzzing. Everywhere I look there is, of course, something to be done, a project half-finished looking at me reproachfully, dust bunnies prowling under the bed. The bathroom needs scrubbing and I dutifully swab the decks but my heart’s not in it. Laundry goes in, yet another load in the endless cycle. I close my...

I love the feeling of fullness and satisfaction that comes after you’ve finished reading the final sentence of a book that you anticipated for a long time and which turned out to be completely worth the wait, when you slowly close the cover and hold the book in your hands, sitting still for a moment while your brain reluctantly returns to the present, leaving a small part of itself forever among the characters and events you’ve been so deeply involved in and with for the last however many days ago it was you plunged in and knowing that it will...

I could not possibly be (or have been) any less motivated to do anything today but read. Not even writing holds much allure, although I’ve been thinking about writing all weekend, and couldn’t. Friday I couldn’t because I was gone all evening having dinner with girlfriends, and Saturday I couldn’t because LJ was down. Well, I suppose I COULD have written, but I wasn’t really in the mood, so I read instead. I read all day yesterday and all day today. I finished a 1443-page book a couple of hours ago and have just started another one. I wonder if...

859 exhibitor booths, all having to do with books or other printed materials, in a conference hall the size of several football fields makes for a delirious day of giddy joy in a bookworm of my caliber. It actually turned out to be a good thing that the majority of the books were in Swedish because I can’t even imagine what I would have spent at a book fair where all the books were ENGLISH! And as it was I came home with 22 books, including 6 each for the kids (plus 3 original Star Wars film-adaptation comic books for...