Biblioholic Turns Shopaholic

Members of Biblioholics Anonymous?

I am a biblioholic. 

Yesterday I bought seven books, three notebooks, a box of pencils made from recycled newspaper, and a sugar-free mocha. 

 It is so hard to get that bookish high anymore.  The nearest independent bookstore is in Omaha.

At Barnes and Noble, the culture is quieter than it was at the late Borders.  A person who reads Jonathan Lethem, the flamboyant SF-loving booksellers at Borders used to tell me, might prefer Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood to Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone. (Actually I like  both.)   They would allow me to buy any literary fiction, since it was out of their realm of expertise, but would have mocked me for Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey.   

I haven't the faintest idea what anybody reads at B&N. That's okay with me. 

I picked up a plastic basket and meandered through the new fiction, the genre books, the best-selling rock biographies (Mick or Neil?), the art books, and then spilled my mocha on my shirt.  

LAUNDRY TIP:  when you get home,  throw the shirt into the washer on hot immediately.  

I sat down to ascertain if I wanted Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood, among other books.   It looks like Twilight without vampires.  I bought it.

The cashier and I were astonished by my spending, and I do remember babbling something about Christmas (in October).  But I hadn't been to B&N in a month, so I bought all the books I might have bought on weekly visits otherwise.   I stuffed two shopping bags into my bike pannier, slung my purse over my shoulder, and on my ride home anxiously stopped several times to adjust the hooks on my bike rack.

Lucy and Ethel

Shopping for books is a little like I Love Lucy.  There's the manic gal with the bicycle helmet, her best friend Ethel, the "Nook trader" (just like Wall Street), his/her best friend Ethel, the employees pushing dollies of books in their personal hell of Dante's Inferno, their best friend Ethel, and nobody in the fiction section.

At home I snuck in my two shopping bags.  Then I did laundry, vacuumed the living room, and made chicken soup.

So much of life is about shopping.

But, yes, I am a perfect housewife.