Reading, writing and 'rithmetic... nope, just reading

One of the unfortunate side effects of university for me was that it taught me to dislike reading fiction for pleasure. I had to read so much that I was sick of it. Then I was in the mad scramble to find a career (until I settled on "professional observer") and so I had no time to read for a few decades. I don't think I visited a library for 20 years or more.

Now I'm trying to recapture that lost love of reading fiction for pleasure. I strolled through a new bookstore the other night, and saw absolutely nothing of interest. Part of it was that the prices have gone ever higher for books, to where a simple mass-market paperback is eight dollars. That's a bit much for something that I can devour in two nights. Part of it is that a lot of the books that are currently on the market, like films and television, seem to have been recycled from earlier authors and ideas. And the pervasiveness of "media fiction" (where one or more authors contribute to a series of books that are based on a movie or a television show) is obvious when a whole shelf of books all have the same logo in different colors, just with different titles like "Star Wars: The Attack of the 837th Variation On a Theme."

It's annoying.

So I went looking for a used bookstore. And I found one (only one), a little hole-in-the-wall in a shopping strip, sandwiched between a laundromat and a Chinese take-out restaurant. It was small, dimly lit, and cluttered, with piles of books stacked horizontally, vertically and diagonally. The shelves were a bit too close together, making the aisles narrow. The proprietor had taken the time to categorize them and then to alphabetize by author, which is an enormous help, instead of some used bookstores where they just shlump the books together by category, like "Romance" or "Mystery."

I was in heaven.

There's something about a used bookstore, the way it smells slightly musty, the way the dry, yellowing pages of the old books exude memories into the air. It smells of quiet, of patience, of summers spent reading on the front porch or in the park, of winters spent curled up on the couch with a favorite tome.

I found a few books and paid $6 for them. Now I'm set for a week or so. I'll see whether I can get back in touch with the ravenous reading monster that I was when I was a child.