Buying Books

Life's been a little much lately, not bad, just...much. Work, kids, more kids, more work, laundry, and then, to top it all off, jury duty. So when jury duty ended mid-afternoon yesterday (guilty), and S was home with kids, I decided I deserved a reward for surviving the previous five days, and I took myself off to the mall, which is halfway between jury duty and home, and which I've been trying to get to for weeks. The mall was not a reward--in fact, it was hellish--but the work trousers that I finally found--Liz Claiborne petites at a truly hellish Macy's--were rewarding.

Then it was time for the real reward. I headed for the big-box bookstore where I got All Souls for S (who just read Easter Rising and loved it--both are on the top of my ever-expanding list) and some of our favorite board books for the new baby next door (Goodnight Moon, Good Dog Carl, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Barnyard Dance) (has anyone noticed that regular books now all come as board books, which seems, to my mind, to dilute the babyness of board books, I mean, why does a baby need Olivia? then again, I think all those books, which we got in board, and which I thus think of as board, might have originally been regular, which makes me completely moot on this point) (I also saw these incredibly silly books, which made me feel way past the baby demographic, which, of course, I am) (not past the baby demographic because I didn't get the books, but because I imagined the yuppie baby showers at which the non-moms would coo over the books and I had no interest, indeed, was kind of disgusted) (I do have a sense of humor, really, I do, I'm just so bored of the coolness of babydom, even the self-mocking coolness of babydom, which, in our pseudo-ironic age, is, of course, the apotheosis of cool, supposedly).

I know, we're not talking rewards for me, yet. But we're getting there.

Then I sat on a stool and read the first 50 pages of Cancer Vixen, which I quite enjoyed despite, or perhaps even partly because of, the name-dropping fabulousness which some review objected to, but I found humorously self-mocking (unlike the boring self-mocking of those baby books). These days I am awed by creativity of all sorts, but especially the kind that can combine visual and verbal, which I am absolutely uncapable of, being a solely verbal kind of person, although my dear friend K the graphic designer is determined to prove that I have the visual deep within me. But she's wrong. Anyway, Cancer Vixen is definitely to be finished, but I think at the bookstore, as it is a quick read and not something I particularly need to own (I did start out wondering whether there was a graphic memoir section, and I think if Fun Home had not been out of stock, I would have bought them both, on some kind of principle I can't define, but Cancer Vixen was in--surprise--the cancer section, and Fun Home was out of stock, so I didn't).

And now we get to the real reward, the book I bought, for me. Yes, my lonely copy of Kurt Cobain's journals is lonely no more, for I now have my very own copy of Courtney Love's diaries, and I really need to get some work done now, so I will tell you about that another time.