Books!! & other ways of passing the time. . .

On Saturday we took a small road trip to one of our favorite places to spend a lot of money: Borders!!! Now, not all Borders were created equal. In fact, when Borders came to New Orleans, there was disappointment all around, I think. And we have seen Borders ranging from the awesome (Ann Arbor) to pathetic (Houston) and everything (but not everywhere) in between. This particular Borders is about 1 1/2 hours away, and worth the trip. I was the one who wanted to go. This has been fairly rare, I must admit--part of my overall "crisis of literacy" (and not the one that I'm writing about in the dissertation). You see, for someone who wholeheartedly believes in the importance and value of reading to the human person, I have done painfully little of it for the past few years. I have had little motivation to pick up a book, especially a book I had never read before. Especially fiction. I did find time for some religious works, and have particularly enjoyed reading conversion stories. I would quip, "Graduate school will do that," and I believe that's true to a degree. I couldn't even really browse in a bookstore--I had no idea what to look for!! And on a level, it pained me. On another level, I was consumed by deep frustration and even a little apathy.

The good news is, this is passing, or has passed. I have read more books this year than in many recent years. Some have been children's books--okay, MANY have been children's books!! Most have been fantasy. It is possible that all have been fantasy (except the dissertation books, and I'm not sure how rereading Sons and Lovers for a chapter counts. . .) But at any rate, I have been reading, and I went to a bookstore, and with real enjoyment, picked out books that I actually want to read--some for me and some for my son. And as an extra bonus, I got a 25% educator discount!!!

So these were our purchases:

• for the toddler: Learn Shapes with Frog (shaped like a frog, and she recently learned to say "frog" even though daddy & mommy insist on saying "froggy") and The Crayola Rainbow Colors Book. (She also got a "duck"--as she says instead of "ducky"--which is actually a TY goose from the Charlotte's Web movie. Cute!)

• for the 10-year-old: Time Cat by Lloyd Alexander, Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton (of Borrowers fame), and Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow, which seems to be written in the Roald Dahl tradition. Two we put back are Stowaway by Karen Hesse and Robert Andrew Parker (because we couldn't get everything) and The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, which I've been looking at for months because it looks so compelling and postmodern (in a good way).

• for the husband: (and for the Tolkien collection) The Return of the Shadow by J. R. R. Tolkien, because we (though not me so much) are actively building up our collection of the back histories. I find them interesting in a scholarly way, but difficult to read cover-to-cover. I'm all for collecting them, though!

• for me: A Penguin Deluxe edition of Lady Chatterly's Lover, which really wouldn't be anything interesting, except that it has very amusing (and kind of pathetic) cartoons about D. H. Lawrence's life all over the cover. So really, I bought it more for the cover than for the text, but it really was worth it!! And I also bought a fantasy novel called City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer. I've never heard of Vandermeer, but the back blurb claims that he "has reinvented the literature of the fantastic." What was really interesting to me, though, was not the novelty, though that's what initially caught my attention; rather, the book has a "feel" of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It definitely seems postmodern, perhaps less well-organized than Calvino's (Calvino was, after all, a genius), and involves intertwining stories. It is a city of "elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, and incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origins." And that's not even mentioning characters! I hope it lives up to its blurb without being confusing and pointless (a definite danger with postmodernism!).

All in all, a happy book-buying excursion! ;) Now I have to find time to read! I'm supposed to be polishing off chapter 4 of the dissertation this week, after I prep for my class for the next few weeks. I have a doctor's appointment Monday (and here begin the weekly visits), and I will see if my doctor thinks I can safely go to the Renaissance Festival next Saturday!! I hadn't been thinking of going, but then it occurred to me--if I can go on a shopping trip this weekend, why not a festival next? I only feel pregnant when I'm trying to sleep and have to sit up to change positions, and when I have periodic fits of exhaustion during the day. Other than that, I just feel like. . . me! ;)