An Orgy of Type and Color
I know it’s a sign of some ignorance, but I loves me a big, fat chain bookstore. Shelves after shelves of tomes and pamphlets and magazines and graphic novels. It’s an orgy of type and color and potential infatuation or disappointment, and everyone’s invited, no matter how high-brow or trite or picayune or epic.
I make every excuse to run to a bookstore, of any kind, though more often than not it’s Borders, Barnes and Noble, or—when I’m adventurous—Half Price Books. No matter what my excuse, I usually at least browse through:
- science (e.g. A New Kind of Science);
- computer science (e.g. The vi Pocket Companion);
- comics (e.g. The Walking Dead); and
- magazines (e.g. Linux User & Developer).
Occasionally, I wander nostalgically through fantasy/sci-fi, just long enough to remember my late-blooming fascination, but not so long that I’m reminded of my disillusionment. In the same way that Jesus songs are awkward by virtue of their having to be about, well, Jesus, fantasy/sci-fi stories typically fall apart around the necessity to weave some contrivance or another into the heart of everything.
I might most accurately describe it as a lust for books, or better yet a masochistic aberration, since the most probable course of events includes
- wandering more or less aimlessly through the book store;
- finding one or five wonderfully enticing books;
- buying one or five wonderfully enticing books;
- finding room on bookshelves, on back of toilet, under the bed for one or five wonderfully enticing books;
- staring at new books longingly, from across the room, never quite daring to approach;
- growing restless when in the same room as the wonderfully enticing books, wracked by guilt; and then
- write a blog post about the whole unfortunate affair.
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