Read It And Laugh

For a year now, I've been volunteering for Friends of the Library. It's a quirky, labor-not-too-intensive way to spend time around books and the people who love them. We throw almost nothing away (except for Reader's Digest Condensed books, which always make me nostalgic). I read a significant number of RDC chopped and channeled books. Night of the Hunter was one of them. Whoa! I was afraid to look at people's knuckles, for awhile.

FOL is a lot of fun. I work at the warehouse where donations are made, so I participate with the first sorting, before our book mavens, who cull for our retail sources and the on-line sales, have had their picks. We get stuff no one would believe: musty copies of Horatio Alger books (where have they been?), someone's complete collection of Vanity Fair magazine - but also copies of Hello! and Amazing Detective, opera LPs, bibles by the carload, diet books featuring seaweed and tofu, some of the most beautiful cookbooks ever - really, porno shots of food and landscapes with your occasional recipe thrown in.

The people I work with are just as solitary and disenfranchised as me. So we chortle about BBC TV series featuring Older People, and self-help sex books. We eat pretzels and Pepperidge Farm goldfish and all the baked goods anyone wants to bring in, which we discuss with passion and committment. Don't even start with what we find in books: prescriptions, love and hate notes, photos of people with bubble hair and strange props, invitations to events long ago.

I like to work with the kids' books, packing them up for storage (bankers' boxes) with all their weird shapes and sizes, musing about whether my granddaughter would be interested in particular YA books (she is such a sophisticated 10 year old but still reassured by happy endings) (who isn't?) Kids have ways of loving books with crayons and stickers and nicks and tears out of pages in ways that we, the elders, no longer allow ourselves. I don't throw anything away unless it has already fallen apart and shed too much of itself to be useful or enticing.

The warehouse is where all my good (and not so good) reads come from. We get a lot of pre-release books from various reviewers and I just love those puppies, even when they are worse than mediocre. They'll be showing up in this book reviewing blog very soon, probably in multiples.