I rarely carry a purse that isn't large enough to fit a book, and if you opened it up (the purse, that is) you would be almost certain to find one or two. Sometimes I buy books just because they're small enough to fit into an evening clutch. (Because generally when I find myself in an instance where I would need to carry an evening clutch, shit is so boring that I end up fervently wishing that I had a book tucked in there next to the switchblade and slim flask.)

One of the things I'm most looking forward to about moving to a new apartment (besides getting out of the bathtub and standing naked in front of the heater for an hour or two) is that I'll finally get to unpack my books from their sad, sad boxes, and organize them like this:

Simply beautiful. I could spend days in that photo. The color-coded organization scheme appeals to the aesthete in me, and the librarian side of me is just fine with it, too. (I am far from a Dewey thumper. FAR. Yes, some people do organize their home collections with it. We call those people freaks.)

My bedside table is stacked high with books (and ok, issues of Wizard magazine, too) that I'm currently in the middle of, almost done with, and have only just opened. I like reading several different books at once, so that at any given moment I can pick one up to go with my ever-mercurial mood.

In the current pile:

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
A sea monster, town secrets, and a ghost story? Yes, please. I was further sold by page 7:

"I watched until the motorboats came back into sight, collectively straining to pull something pale behind them, something enormous and glinting in the new sun. And that's how I found myself running barefoot over the cold grass down to Lakefront Park, even as weary as I was at that moment. I went past our pool, now so thick with algae that it had become a frog pond, plunking with a thousand belly flops of terror when I passed."

BELLY FLOPS OF TERROR...what a great phrase. I can totally picture the frogs, frantic eyes bulged out, legs splayed mid-jump, and it amuses me to no end.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Just picked this up at the off-hand mention in a brief story about a 7-year-old caught with 70 grams of crack on him at school. I can't even make a joke about that. A 7-year-old. Just horribly, horribly sad.

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr
I finished this one last week but I mentioned it so briefly that I wanted to give it another plug. It reads like fiction smoother than most fiction does, and yet it's completely real (and carefully researched).

The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu
Check out this interview snippet (excerpted from Harper's and posted on Jezebel):

Death and oppression. Yeah, this book is probably going to make me cry.

Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic by Martha Beck
This story of unexpected challenges and rewards involved with carrying and raising a developmentally disabled child came highly recommended. I haven't yet had time to get more than a chapter or two in, so I passed it on to my mother. She called me to tell me that she stayed up until 12:30am reading it, which means that it's as good as the Bible in her eyes.

Oil! by Upton Sinclair
I will get through this book. I will get through this book before I see There Will Be Blood (on which it's based) this week. I will. A tremendous book, but I just haven't been in the mood for it lately. Daniel Day-Lewis, on the other hand, I am always in the mood for.

Being Dead by Jim Crace
Someone recommended this book to me, calling it beautifully written and haunting in memory. The New York Times Book Review had this to say: "It's not clear to me why Jim Crace isn't world famous. Few novels are as unsparing as this one in presenting the ephemerality of love given the implacability of death, and few are as moving in depicting the undiminished achievement love nevertheless represents."

And The Literary Review chimed in with "What Crace, with dazzling originality, has done is to log the death of two natural scientists from an appropriately physical point of view. No detail is spared, yet the effect is strangely poetic and even reassuring...In that spare story a universe of poetry and observation is contained. This is a work of near-genius".

I've never been big on the gritty details of death, but I'm intrigued by the poetic and reassuring effect mentioned in the review, and curious to see how the Crace pulls this off. I'm expecting an interesting, if difficult, read out of this one.

A note for any of you that would like to read one/some of these books. The titles are linked to Amazon, more for the reviews than anything else. To get ahold of the book without having to buy it, check out worldcat.org. You enter the book's information, as well as your zip code, and the site generates a listing of nearby libraries that carry the book.

Free information. Get it!

If the above "I read a-fucking-lot" came off as boasting, know that it was not intended that way. Rather, I regard books with a fierce passion generally reserved for shoes, whiskey, and Tom Waits, and I thoroughly enjoy passing good books on to others so that they may get something out of them, too. It's hard for me to read something wonderful (or hear a great song/see a good movie/work of art) and not want to tell everyone about it. It's like "Hey! There are some beautiful things out there! Things that make living worthwhile! I shit you not! Let me show you them!"

So that's why I blather on about books. Not because I want you to know that I'm really, really smart, but because I'm a giver. (If it was just an attempt to demonstrate how devastatingly intelligent I am, I would just come out and say so. Because I am.)

Besides, "I'd rather read than spend time with most people. This is not normal, and probably not healthy, but I could be doing worse things so let me be. Or else I'll (paper) cut you." isn't really the sort of thing one brags about.