I can’t keep it up much longer, this unrecognizable dancing

I was a bit annoyed at first when my boyfriend insisted that we stop at the library on the way to Whole Foods yesterday — turning the excursion from a quick, pleasant outing to the “market” to a string of mere errands. But the Brookline Library turned out to be a very rewarding detour. The NEW BOOKS section had a whole shelf of poetry and I veritably squealed to see how many books from my mental to-read list they had. As I pulled one after another from the shelf, I looked at John in disbelief: Can I take as many as I want? My experience with the NEW BOOKS at libraries has generally been that the ones I want are perpetually checked out. I half expected some kind of limit per “customer.” But! Nobody reads poetry! So more for me. I walked out with:

Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Craig Morgan Teicher)
Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Cate Marvin)
Quaker Guns (Caroline Knox)
Human Dark with Sugar (Brenda Shaughnessy)
Something Bright, Then Holes (Maggie Nelson)
Nomina (Karen Volkman)

Plus a big beautiful coffee table book on 100 contemporary artists from Phaidon. All free!! I asked John why they had such a good selection and he said maybe because Brookline has one of the highest literacy rates in the country. (I couldn’t find any data to back that up. But if it’s true that literacy and affluence are highly correlated …)

It thrills me to have new books, but then, it thrills me to have new underwear, new hair products, new condiments, so perhaps this says less about my “literacy rate” and more about my materialism rate. Perhaps relatedly, my reading habits suffer less from having too little to read and more from having too much. There are books I want to read littered all about my apartment. I must start over 100 books per year, but I only finish maybe 20 or 30. Economist Tyler Cowen sort of recommends this approach -- he claims people would read more/faster if they let themselves abandon books they weren’t enjoying. But I often abandon books I am enjoying, when another imminently enjoyable one falls on my desk…