I. Love. Books.
Since I often can't spend all that much time at home due to indoor allergies, I spend a lot of time in bookstores. Unfortunately, since I moved to Santa Fe, my only option is Borders. There are some used book stores, but I'm terribly allergic to them. Santa Fe is not necessarily the cleanest. Businesses are not held to the same standard here as they are in the Bay Area. Even the least kept up bookstore in San Francisco never smelled as musty as the cleanest one here. But, I digress.
As you already know, I'm entering the interesting journey of Low-Impact Living. This means I've committed to not shopping at large corporations as much as is possible. Since I can't buy used books, that means I can only buy new books. This presented a problem to my new low-impact philosophy. For a while, I just suffered. But recently, I thought of a way around it. Since I spend so much time at Borders already, I thought to myself, "Well, get yer arse off the internet and read some books!"
Since the time of that revelation, I've read about 5 Philip K. Dick books and a Chuck Palahniuk book. It's not a bad plan. Once in a while I'll find myself wishing I owned a book I have read so I could refer to it for one reason or another, but all in all, I'm surviving just fine.
Today, as I sat in the brown faux-leather chair at Borders, I realized something. I could ask for new books for Christmas! It's true it will create an impact, but not nearly to the same degree as going willy-nilly all year long with new book buying. So...here's my list.
V – Thomas Pynchon
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
High-Rise – J.G. Ballard
Plexus – Henry Miller
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Pale Fire – Nabokov
Invisible Monsters – Chuck Palahniuk
Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
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