cyrano | Another moral logjam (Reply)

On the way out the door to work, I caught a glimpse of the spine of Carioca Fletch on the bookshelf, and I thought "I haven't read those books in forever. That would be fun." That sort of popcorn reading would be perfect for 'stick it on the Kindle and grab a few pages when you can'. So I got to work and I found that the nearly forty-year-old book was ten dollars for Kindle or Nook, and the paperbacks were even more. I was, of course, morally outraged, given that I'd paid about a buck and a half for mine and gotten even less back for them during The Great Purge. Which thought poked me, and I checked for used copies on Powells.com ($6-8 plus shipping) and finally abebooks.com ($3.50 each with free shipping). I rubbed my hands with glee and prepared to blow $35 on my reading for the summer; this moment was, of course, when my brain finally decided to ask itself why I thought I'd actually read these, given the lack of reading of *anything* I've been doing for the past year, and did I really want to set aside space for a stack of paperbacks, space that I have spent the past three years fastidiously trying to keep as empty as it was when I moved in?

So now I glower at the page for Slategrey books, as if the fault lay with it.