Keep Me Away From The Bookstore

Okay, I admit it. I leave a big footprint. Sure I recycle, and I'm fully aware of the evils of crass consumerism, but at the close of any weekend, I find myself saddled with two or three more plastic bags and the half-dozen new books or magazines they once contained. I'm of the "having" persuasion rather than bent on simply "being", or more profoundly, on not "being" at all. I'd probably make even a Zen master turn violent. A profane sonavabitch I am.

For instance, I went to the Richmond Chapters this Sunday intent on picking up the Viking hardcover edition of Proust's In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower (only $9.99!), before it's out-of-print and hard to find. Well, my mission was accomplished, but augmented by no fewer than 19 other titles— of which twelve were expressly for me. I guess that makes me an obscene size 20 in the Adbuster scheme of things, right up there with Nike and Starbucks.
One of these impulse buys is Sara Nelson's wonderful So Many Books, So Little Time, which, 50 pages in, I'll have to provisionally award **** out of *****. As an aside, has anybody noticed how the Siskel & Ebert Thumbs Up system has of late been running out of thumbs and resorting to dubious ratings like "Two Very Big Thumbs Up", "Two Thumbs Way Up", and "Two Very Enthusiastic Thumbs Up"? WTF?

Any book lover will relate to Nelson's observations:

I choose them [books] the way I choose my friends: because somebody nice introduced us, because I liked their looks, because the best of them turn out to be smart and funny and both surprising and inevitable at the same time.

and

In reading, as in life, even if you know what you're doing, you really kind of don't... If you want to make the book god laugh, show him your reading list.

and completely unrelated to bibliophilia, but a germane answer to a question a co-worker and I have been wrestling with

You have to talk loud to be heard, and if you can develop a sense of humor and insert it into much of what you say, you'll be heard even better.

That's not what I wanted to hear.

I like the book's cover—the balance-defying impossibility brings out the child in me: How would someone get into or leave the centre of such a fortress? What would it take to make it collapse? And look at the colours!

One book I didn't buy (because the store copy's fold-outs were dog-eared) but will order on-line is Mitsuhiro Kurokawa's gorgeously drawn and verdant Dinosaur Valley.

I did buy a book on Zen, which I now keep on my desk at work, just to advantageously tip my karma.