No limits

I read a great deal. I read 98 new books last year. 85% of them came from the library.

I’m in my local library about once a week or so. Sometimes I slowly browse the new titles, sometimes I head for specific subjects. Sometimes I just head to the circulation desk to pick up some books I put on hold through their website

Sometimes I use their wicked fast internet connection to upload a couple months worth of photos to Smug Mug.

Yesterday I ran in looking for Photoshop CS3 for Dummies. I was just going to get the one book & then head out. But in the same aisle my eye was caught by “Stuff White People Like” which I had been meaning to see if the library had for some time now. And then I saw “A Treasure of Deceptions” by an author whose other books I had read & enjoyed. Oh and there is “The Illustrated History of Human Migrations” I bet Havoc would like that.

I ran in to get one book and am now holding 4.

The most direct path to the circulation desk was through fiction aisle A-Be where I noticed another book by an author I had read recently. It seems it was the start of a series. Speaking of series, what is this collection of books all titled “Murder on the <insert ship name>”?  Oh and these a shelf a over which look like Sex in the City meet Stephanie Plum? One book from each is added to my pile

I arrive at the circulation desk with 7 books, having only intended to get one.

I do this all the time.

Back in my double income no kids days I did it in bookstores.

Odds are I will only enjoy about half the books I have picked out. I finished 98 new books last year, but I started almost twice that many. I’d get 100 or so pages into a book, decide I didn’t like it enough to waste my valuable reading time on it any longer, flipped to the last 10 pages, read how it turned out and toss it aside. In my bookstore days I would probably have enjoyed two thirds of them. The big difference is I am out nothing by it at the library, whereas I spent from $5-30 on that book I didn’t like at a bookstore.

I was and still am much pickier in bookstores since I can’t just take the book back & get  a refund if I don’t like it. That narrows my choices. I stick with authors I know & love & genres I am most familiar with. When I get my books from bookstores, new or used, I am limited by finances & fear of wasting those dollars on something I won’t like. I didn’t branch out much then & do so even less now.

But libraries! Libraries are wonderful! Look at all those books! And they are FREE! If you don’t like them, so what? Take them back. Get more. Try again. You are only out some time. I have been a regular visitor to my library since Mayhem was born and I have read or at least sampled hundreds of books I would never have picked up in a bookstore. Some of my favorite series, such as Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher or Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple mysteries would have been passed over because they are not in my preferred time period or setting. I certainly never would have read all the Discworld novels this past fall if I had had to pay for them (I didn’t like a third of them & disliking just one would have kept me from buying the rest). But I could take the chance on these hardcover books in the library. I feel so free in there.

When I arrived at the desk to check out I was told I had 25 books out currently & did I want to change their renewal date to match these? I said sure and tried to imagine what 25 books I had out & where they might be.  I suffer from book blindness. What others see as a huge stack of books is just some books to me, maybe about 5 or 6. Had you asked me on the day the photo above was taken how many books were on my nightstand I would have said “A few. Maybe 6 or so.”. I just don’t see them, they are too much a part of the landscape & decor of my home.

My personal best total at the library was this summer when, while checking out another half dozen or so books & movies with the boys I was informed I currently had 47 books already checked out.

Fortunately the library has no limits on the number of books you can have out at any one time.