book notes
Jul. 23rd, 2003 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jfbI took Lloyd: What Happened back to the library unread. A satirical "novel of business", it had caught my attention in a used book store a few months ago with its use of charts and graphs to illustrate the plot. It was clever and fairly engaging, but, you know, I just left the corporate world for a while (not that PlaceWare was so very corporate). I don't need to read about it.
I've often thought that if I managed to spend less time browsing in bookstores and use that time instead to actually read, I'd be happier. The same goes for libraries, but today I figured out something. When I'm at the library, looking up books I've already picked up and put down, books I know I'm not going to check out now, I'm actually enjoying the sense of possibility--the infinite number of books I could read. Once I've settled on a book, all those other options blink (temporarily) out of existence, and I find that kind of sad.
In fact, I almost never check out a single book--I often check out two just to delay the decision about which one to read. And, of course, I jump back and forth between multiple books anyway.
Today at the library I perused three interesting picture books by Stephen T. Johnson: Alphabet City, City by Numbers, and As the City Sleeps. The first two are realistic paintings of letter and number shapes found in ordinary objects in the city; the third is sort of a collection of paintings of slightly fantastical city-at-night scenes. Fun to page through.
And I checked out The Bush Dyslexicon. The first few pages made an effort to assure me it's not just a collection of funny "Bush is dumb" quotes, so I decided to read the rest of it.
I've often thought that if I managed to spend less time browsing in bookstores and use that time instead to actually read, I'd be happier. The same goes for libraries, but today I figured out something. When I'm at the library, looking up books I've already picked up and put down, books I know I'm not going to check out now, I'm actually enjoying the sense of possibility--the infinite number of books I could read. Once I've settled on a book, all those other options blink (temporarily) out of existence, and I find that kind of sad.
In fact, I almost never check out a single book--I often check out two just to delay the decision about which one to read. And, of course, I jump back and forth between multiple books anyway.
Today at the library I perused three interesting picture books by Stephen T. Johnson: Alphabet City, City by Numbers, and As the City Sleeps. The first two are realistic paintings of letter and number shapes found in ordinary objects in the city; the third is sort of a collection of paintings of slightly fantastical city-at-night scenes. Fun to page through.
And I checked out The Bush Dyslexicon. The first few pages made an effort to assure me it's not just a collection of funny "Bush is dumb" quotes, so I decided to read the rest of it.
