Books have always been a major part of my life: my parents told me I could read before I could even talk. Throughout grade school silent-reading times to high school study halls, more often than not I was neck-deep in a reference book or fantasy novel. While my reading habits have slipped slightly during college,I am taking this summer to get back in the swing of things, increasing my input of carefully-selected words so I can hopefully increase my output. Reading is one of the best ways to become better at writing--or so I've been told.
While I do read e-books on a well-loved Kindle, I have an easier time reading physical, paper books. I'm not really sure why. It's more tactile? I'm not sure. What I am sure of is I want to tracing down hard copies of everything on the list my writing professor/major advisor emailed me this summer, and read them cover-to-cover. One place I thought I could do that is my local library's book sale. Every year or so, my county's library commission sells off old or donated books in a convention hall as a fundraiser for the library. I figured I would be able to buy most of the items she mentioned there, despite my unfamiliarity with them(I usually don't seek after literary fiction, which is the kind I had to write for the course). Unfortunately, what hurt me more was my unfamiliarity with the book sale.
Imagine something like the Scholastic Book Fair:
If you are an introverted geek like me, the day the book fair was in town was almost as good as the actual fair, if not better.
Well, the book sale was like that, only the books were roughly stacked, no, heaped on folding tables labeled with vague genres and labels, with no other matter of organization save the occasional box which meant nothing. Most of them were also old, some so old you could barely read the spines, and a handful of other people were perusing the same selection you were.
Enchanting.
I spent a good fifteen, twenty minutes rummaging through the "Art and Literature" before realizing that the selection was not comprehensive enough to find pretty much anything on the list. (In hindsight, this might have been because I wasn't looking in the "Novels" sections.) I decided to cut my losses, picked out some interesting gems, and went to the "Science-Fiction and Western" section for some fun reading. If that title isn't broad enough for you, I found a few thrillers in there too--although those aren't mutually exclusive: one of the gems I picked out seemed to be a space murder mystery.
It was honestly a bit fatiguing, having to sift through Rapture fiction and vampire novels for something that seemed interesting. While I could imagine having fun at an event like this with perhaps a bit more organization, the way things were it was a little overwhelming--there may have actually been too many books for me to handle. It didn't help that we only had an hour to shop before the sale closed for the night. All in all, I had a good time. I got an armload of interesting books, my mother got some play scripts and records for my sister, and I got a chance to support the local library, where I just might go for some of the books on my list.