This afternoon, to reward myself for finishing up my “design a network for a small office” (blech!) assignment (12 hours late, naturally), I went to the twitch-inducing Barnes & Noble at the mall to return Case Histories.  Not because I’ve lost my desire to read it, oh no.

I was at the library, waiting by the elevator with a cart of books.  This is the prime grazing location for our ‘sale books,’  the stuff that people donate that doesn’t make it to our own shelves.  And there was a copy of Case Histories.  Slightly beat up.  The UK edition.  A mere $2.  So of course I buy that.

Which leads to me trundling back to the mall to pick out something shiny & new.  I go through the same dilemmas again.  I still want The King of Attolia to own & cherish, but if I returned the ‘new to me’ book, I should get a new ‘new to me’ book, right?  I considered the  Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Crime & Punishment (I own a different translation and can’t seem to make it through in one piece), I again circled past Kavalier & Clay, but then, with near-perfect certainty, I fell upon Octavian Nothing.  Worth the extra $4, I’m thinking (well, $6 if you add the $2 I paid for Case Histories).

When will I have time to read these?  Sometime after I finish The Girls  and The Secret River.  And the other five library books on my shelf.