addiction

We cleaned our apartment today.  It was a monumental event, especially since I can't remember the last time we cleaned it.  Or rather, the last time I cleaned it.  (Thank you honey.)

It was today that I realized I have a serious problem.  It began to spiral out of control when our local library closed for renovations.  The next closest one was tiny and junky and had terrible hours.  So I began trolling the internet for cheap books to get my fiction fix.  I stalked amazon booksellers and bought stacks of books from them.  Then I got an ad in my inbox:  get 5 books for $20!  Days were spent drooling, scrolling through amazon wish lists and databases, reading reviews, deleting and re-adding.  I negotiated with my inner accountant, and came up with an agreeable bargain.  And last night I got a package of a lot of books.  My shame prevents me from admitting how many.  But I began to realize that my addiction is more than just having or owning; this addiction feeds on searching and list making and reading about.  

Last week I talked my husband into letting me check out books from the university he works for.  He lets me for a little bit every once in awhile until he realizes that I have brought home thirty books and his work is looking for him to return them.  They have a lot of good books.  Fiction, books on writing, psychology, art therapy, theory.   And they have something like eight libraries.  One whole library for art books.  Let me say that again:  One whole library for art books.  Sigh.  And don't get me started on the Harvard Bookstore.  Stacks and piles and shelves of really good, really smart books for those crimson smarties. 

Today I emptied out the box of books.  Books were pulled out from next to the bed, piles were picked up from the living room.  I have books shoved above every row of books on my bookshelf.  I have books hidden under my bed.  I carry them around.  I pile them up.  I think about them.  I order them by subject matter and then jumble them up again according to how badly I want to read them.  I daydream about owning a library with shelves so high you need a ladder on wheels to reach the top shelves. 

I think I'm currently reading seven books.  At the same time.  This is a problem.  Or is it?  Truth is, I will finish many of them.  I won't finish some of them.  Maybe I'll finish them years from now.  Maybe they were never worth finishing.  Maybe I'll get what I need and move on.  I never lend books, I have a hard time giving them away, and I don't even tell people that I read a lot.  I don't join book clubs, because I can't read a book just because someone else is reading it.  Although:  the best class in college I ever took was on Albert Camus and George Orwell.  We inhaled a book a week and talked about it, Socrates style.

When I think of books, I use words like inhale and eat.  I wish I could just open up my head and dump the contents in.  Or swallow them whole.  My need to read is insatiable.  I am always hungry and there is never enough.  I wish I could still get prizes at the library for reading ten books, fifty books, a hundred.  But there is never enough time:  I have to do annoying things like work or clean.  Or maybe if I put down my computer for five minutes.  But then, I'm still reading, right? 

"Knowledge comes from crafted bindings and pages, Buffy, not ones and zeros."

Some of the books I'm reading:  this, this, this, and highly recommend this.