Friday, July 28, 2006

Addiction or Compulsion?



On Monday I walked into the campus bookstore for file folders and I walked out with file folders and 2 new books:

The Journalist and The Murderer by Janet Malcolm & Public Editor #1, by Daniel Okrent

I don't need any more books.My stack of Books To Read was 41 books high Monday morning. Now there are 43. I've read only 3 books since April. Plus months of barely touched New Yorkers, forsaken for the Paris Review, which I've half-read both issues, but then, that's only quarterly so you see I have a problem. I started in on a collection of Orwell essays on Monday and am still not done with the first.

Some of my lack of reading time can be attributed to a very dense summer session course, the reading for which was the equivalent of at least a few volumes.

But I'm about to start work on my masters project again and I'm not sure how I'll be able to get to any of these books.

Just picking out a few for my impending vacation seems daunting.

I avoid bookstores for this reason. Libraries are also dangerous places, but on my list of things to do while I am in Seattle is to Be In the New Central Library At Least Once Every Day. That's the "Living Room" of the library pictured above. I'm in love with Koolhaas' building, and perhaps I will take many books and curl up in one of the big nerf chairs and read lots and lots.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you from Evergreen State? I love the Seattle Library, too.

kimberly kinchen said...

Technically I'm from San Diego, but I did do my undergrad at The Evergreen State College, and lived in PDX and Seattle between and after. So...adopted.

New York has so many great public spaces, but none of its newer buildings come close to that baby. I was so skeptical during the design phase, when I was still living there, and all my doubts evaporated once I saw it in the flesh/steel/glass.