Pandemic Disappointment

I found out yesterday that there's a new Steinbeck biography coming out called Mad at the World, the first in 25 years as the marketing claims.

After filling out the "Tell Us What to Buy" form on the Ventura County Library website, to urge the powers that be to buy it, I suddenly remembered an old friend I hadn't seen in a while. It resided comfortably at the Ojai Library, possibly my favorite library in Ventura County (it feels like a wood-paneled reading room without the wood paneling, although its ceiling beams are crucial to that atmosphere), and one of my all-time favorite libraries, alongside Lied Library at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV), the Boulder City Library well removed from Las Vegas, and of course the Ventura College Library (more formally the Evelyn and Howard Boroughs Library).

In the Ojai Library, my old friend used to face the first window before the side entrance to the Ojai Library because that's where biographies once were. It was a paperback edition of John Steinbeck, Writer by Jackson J. Benson, that I occasionally bumped into in past years elsewhere, but never fully read it. 

The Ojai Library not only invites you to explore what's deepest in your mind, but gently encourages you to give a try to that which you put to the side but can't completely dismiss because it's part of you. Before the end of last year, when my mother, my sister and I were in Ojai, I vowed to take it home with me and try it again, instead of eyeing it hopefully and then walking away like I usually did, certain that I already had too many books to carry home with me on the bus. I wanted a souvenir of Ojai to take home and this was it, and generally, whenever I checked out books in person from that library, I always read them because I didn't want to lose the magic I felt they had by dint of living there.

Here's the thing about institutions, such as libraries, that are closed during the pandemic: The people who make them what they are get busy. They reorganize. They streamline. Projects that were pushed to the netherworld because of the sheer number of things to do every day to keep a library open to the public rise and demand the attention that they know is now there.

For libraries, this also means weeding the stacks, taking a good hard look at what's gotten dusty, waterlogged, warped, but stayed on the shelves because that's what the library had. Take a book still readable in those conditions off the shelf and the hole it creates might not be filled. It's budgets, how many new books can be bought in the fiscal year, and a host of other factors. Sentimentality comes into the weeding, but there's no place for it if the library is to remain vital and approachable.

That's the reasonable, public-facing explanation. Sadness is left to patrons like me.

It's not that John Steinbeck, Writer is bad; it was always just the sheer length of 1,184 pages that I didn't have the patience for throughout the years, much as I admire Steinbeck and want to know more about him. The same thing happened that time before the end of last year. I didn't get through it. Now that I've taken up reading a lot more than I used to (and not just because of the pandemic; this has been going on before that), I figured that it was time to seek out my old friend, that somewhat waterlogged copy sitting elsewhere in the Ojai Library, away from that particular window, but still there.

I thought it would still be there. I looked it up in the Ventura County library catalog, and I was crestfallen. All there is of Jackson J. Benson is his biography of western writer A.B. Guthrie, Jr. and his anthology of critical essays about Steinbeck's short novels such as Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row. My old friend, one of many things that made me feel at home at the Ojai Library, is gone. Weeded. Every time I went to the Ojai Library, before biographies were moved, I looked for it as I passed by that first window, and sometimes that was all I would see of it. But it comforted me that it was there, the possibility that I might try again. With this pandemic, there are a lot of "Had I knowns..." in the world and of course, had I known, I would have sat down and finally read it the last time I checked it out of the library.

I decided to do something to honor it. From what I can tell so far, Interlibrary Loan isn't available again yet in Ventura County. I'm sure that not every participating library is at full strength yet for that. I wasn't going to wait, though. So I went to AbeBooks and found a fairly reasonably-priced paperback edition of John Steinbeck, Writer, under $10, which, for a 1,184-page book is pretty damn good.

This time, I will sit down and read it. Not because I paid for a copy, but because my old friend deserves it as a fond farewell. Should the day come when I can once again go inside the Ojai Library, I'll miss seeing it. I hope it got at least one more try with someone else.

The Heart's Crossroads (Without Having to Choose Only One)

My heart yearns, reaches for different places. Not necessarily to live there (except for Ventura, where I do), or even visit, but just to know.

On California Street in downtown Ventura, which is the most direct access to the beach, at least if you're not driving (else you have to stop in the parking garage on the left side at the end of California, in the looming shadow of the Crowne Plaza hotel), there's the Channel Islands Lodge No. 214 for the Masons, though they place it on East Santa Clara, because that's where the entrance is. But the side that I gape at is on California, about three floors, all brick on that one side, going up, up, up. I look at it, I gape, and my mind thinks of...New York. New York City. My family genes in motion in my mind and my heart, being that my late father was from New York City and so is my mother. Mainly, I think about my father in such instances because he lived New York City, he drove those streets, he knew them. My mother lived in New York City too, a regular bus rider, but my father knew full well right off the rhythms of those streets, how you had to keep moving lest you wanted a taxicab up your ass as a fashion accessory. The brick of the Masons building on that side of California doesn't look as hard as the brick you'd find on some buildings in New York City, because it has never lived the life that those New York City buildings have. But in my mind, while I look up at that building from that empty parking lot, which is seldom used, I think of those streets. I imagine my father walking them at times, but mainly driving. I look for him in that brick, and I also think about how badly I want to read more about New York City, in history as well as in novels. I think to myself that I will get to it, provided other books don't get in the way. I try to carve out a section for them, because I want to try to find my father in those pages, to get a greater sense of him through the New York City that others have seen and lived and felt deep in their bones. I will.

Of course, I think about Ventura too, the history I still very much want to know. I know some, like how before the Ventura County Government Center was on that particular sprawling spot on Victoria, it was all lemon groves. Same with Via Ventura, our first apartment complex, on Telephone and Saratoga. All lemon groves, too. I also know many times over that the Barnes & Noble shopping center on Telephone, which includes Michael's, PetSmart, Ethan Allen, Sprouts, Kohl's, and a few other places which don't seem as important with how large those loom, was once a drive-in movie theater called the 101 Drive-In (for the 101 freeway, which abuts Ventura at that certain point). I also know about the movie theater on Mills, near the mall, which showed the first Star Wars trilogy when those were originally released. I love movies, which is probably why I've found out more details about both theaters than really anything else in Ventura. But I'm getting to know more, since I live here and I like it here and I hope to be here for a long time to come. For example, I know very well the security guard station not a few feet after you enter the Hall of Administration in the Government Center, as that's where I've taken so many tests, been on many job interviews, and will hopefully be working there soon, even temporarily so I can do my damndest to get my foot in the door in pursuit of full-time work. But I had no idea that there's a security command center in the basement monitoring the cameras all around the Hall of Administration. More security than the one security guard there which, no matter who it is, is always a good soul. There are terrific men and women there (When I was a volunteer at the Green Valley Library in Henderson, Nevada for five years, I knew Ed, its now-former security guard, quite well. I was also a substitute campus supervisor at La Mesa Junior High, where my father taught, for six years, which provided a kind of security on the campus, also herding students to class and escorting students to the office at the radioed request of whoever there wanted them, and monitoring everything going on during lunch). Of course there are also the maps in the Hall of Administration and the various departments, and I've been interviewed in many of them, and been there when the Board of Supervisors has been meeting, watching some of the proceedings on the closed-circuit flatscreen TVs they have at the entrance to the chamber. I want to know much more, though. I've been to the Ventura County Museum back when they had an exhibit of menus from various Ventura County restaurants in decades' past. I'd love to dig into the history in the research library they have there and I have an angle I may want to pursue as a book, about Ventura County's only empire, an unusual one compared to the typical definition of an empire, but no less important to us here in Ventura County.

And then there was today, full-on rush back into my Southern past. I'm a Southerner by birth, not by blood, having been born in Florida, so I don't have all of what the South is thought to be in personality and range of memory. I do have a fierce love of biscuits, sweet tea sometimes, but most especially storytelling as it is in the South. I adore how time is taken to tell a story well, to comb through all the memories, all the details, to slowly yet surely find that path that draws it all together and touches the heart.

I was at Ventura College this morning, where my sister has begun her latest pre-nursing semester, taking another math course as well as Children's Literature as an elective. Today was her second day of the new semester, but I went with her because the administrative assistant in my department, English, Math and Learning Resources, had her last day today ahead of transferring to the Student Services Center a mere hundred feet away, in the Admissions & Records department, a stepping stone in her ultimate career desire to become an academic counselor, as she's also finishing up coursework for her graduate degree, with the major test coming in February involving so much that made me think that the tests I endured in college weren't so bad.

That was my main objective, because when I joined the department as the Instructional Lab Technician in the Learning Resource Center on Saturdays, mainly overseeing the tech side of California State University Long Beach's Master of Social Work satellite program (there are two classes, one at 8:30 and one at 1 p.m. (with time in between for lunch), both done via webcam, with local CSU students in a classroom in the LRC set up for just this purpose, with the webcams and with microphones so they can ask the professors any questions they might have, or participate in the discussions, with one microphone per two students), Susana was not only willing to answer any questions I had, but she also informed me in my first week that even though the Associated Students of Ventura College (ASVC) office was closed on that particular Friday, she called over so that Angeles, one of the main figures there, would know that I was on campus and would be coming over to get my picture taken for my ID. I think I was there that day to also get my TB test done, as is required by the Ventura County Community College District (VCCCD, which also oversees Oxnard College and Moorpark College), and was grateful to her that I could get that done at the same time, as that ID also serves as my bus pass, all bus routes being free to VCCCD students for another school year. I might well be the only staff member who uses the bus system regularly.

So I wanted to see her in person and bid her a fond farewell, even though I had essentially done that already by email. Sure she's only going to the building next to us, but people get busy, and our department still has needs to take care of. This was also one of those days when I didn't have to go to work early downtown, and I found out yesterday that there was going to be a Classified Senate meeting from 10:30 to noon (Classified being where I am, amidst administrative assistants and others in the same realm. Even though I only work Saturdays, as per my contract, I was still very much welcome and welcomed at the meeting), I had to see what that was all about too, and as it turned out, I met a lot more people here than I do on Saturdays. I needed to get a greater sense of the college I call home. And I did.

But before that, after wishing the very best for Susana and also talking to my boss, the dean of the department, for a little bit about Jeopardy!: The Greatest of All Time (she's obsessed with it and even though she's very much a fan of "Jeopardy!", it sounds like she's even more excited about this), I spent time in the library one floor up from my department, a library that I consider my true home in Ventura. This is a library that breathes, that leads, that senses what you want and guides you to it, sometimes without you knowing that you wanted it in that very moment. It happened to me today.

At 9:45, I decided to go to the restroom in the way back of the library, which, from the Quiet Reading Room, involves walking past the shelves of discarded books and textbooks being sold by Friends of the Library, and walking past the librarians' offices as well, including the head librarian, whose mess of an office I admire. It's not a mess for the sake of being messy, but a determined search for a sense of order, just as soon as this one thing gets done, and then this other thing, and then oh look, it's time to go home. That mess has personality.

After the restroom, which is one of the many things I love about being on this campus (it's always clean, but more than that, it actual feels restful), I pulled up the library catalog on my phone to look for The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure by Henry Petroski, which I had returned to the E.P. Foster Library downtown in order to replace it on my nightstand stack of books with Nemo Rising by C. Courtney Joyner, billed as a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I found that the college library had a copy of Petroski's book and I figured to get it there since I always keep space on the shelf of one of my bookcases for books from the Ventura College Library.

I tried. I looked it up and I was ready to go find it. Actually, even though I had intended it to be the one I checked out today (the other four slots of my library account are still full, with five books maximum allowed to be checked out), I got distracted once again by the Leisure Reading section near the entrance/exit of the library when I first walked into the library. It was there that I found out that last October, The Fall of Richard Nixon: A Reporter Remembers Watergate by Tom Brokaw was released and I knew nothing about it. This was the first time I had seen it. I needed to read it and there went the one slot I had for The Road Taken. In Leisure Reading, I also found The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age by Bina Venkataraman, and thought to myself, "Ok, I'll save that one for next time. And The Road Taken, too. And I need to write this out on the ASVC notepad I have so I can keep these in mind for the next time my library card's empty."

I don't know how or why it happened. After leaving the restroom, I had the location of The Road Taken on my phone and was going to look for it. Then, within the Library of Congress classification system that the library uses, I somehow ended up in F209, which I call the Southern section. My life. Part of my heart. I couldn't believe the sheer number of books about the South there was. I mean, I know that there are so many books about it, but this particular selection! There are four volumes of Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and I intend to read all of them. In this section, you can have your pick of Alabama, South Carolina, some of Florida and all the others, Virginia, too, that make up the South. The book that got me deeper into getting back into the past that rests within me was Heart of a Small Town: Photographs of Alabama Towns, which I flipped through and knew I could finish it before I left for the meeting. Didn't have to check it out.

I looked through these deeply evocative photos of street corners, storefronts, churches, parlors in Alabama, and also the quotes that accompanied them, which I include here after transcribing the photos of them from my phone into a Word file I called "Southern Passages":

"When I’d finished I sat on the corner of Phil’s father’s stone and smoked a cigarette and enjoyed the utter quiet of that country graveyard. I watched the Spanish moss swaying, swaying, in the two live oaks by the gate. I was in a kind of spell when I left, peaceful, thinking placidly. . . of all the generations which had passed this way since the Spaniards landed in 1519." – Eugene Walter, "The Back-Roads"

"When death visits our little town, each one left knows that he is diminished, by little or much. No man here is a nobody. Everybody is a somebody. And the sadness at death is genuine. What is more, long memories hold the departed in mind and heart. The vacant church pew, the missing face, the voice, the laughter—the good and not-so-good are remembered and missed." – Viola Goode Liddell, A Place of Springs

"What was this building used for in the past?" he said.
"It was a church, then a bank, then it was a restaurant and a fancy gambling house, and now we got it,” Halley explained. “I think somebody said it used to be a jailhouse too." – Ralph Ellison, "The Golden Day"

"Now, as a matter of fact, I have called in the Devil just recently. He is the only one who can help me get out of this town. Not that I live here, not exactly. I think always about somewhere else, somewhere else where everything is dancing, like people dancing in the streets, and everything is pretty, like children on their birthdays." – Truman Capote, "Children on Their Birthdays"

All of these quotes are me. I yearn for Spanish moss, even though I only saw it once in person, on the way out of Florida, through Tallahassee, essentially at the beginning of a five-day cross-country drive, moving to Southern California. Death, well, I know exactly how that quote feels. And Truman Capote's quote, well, I'm not looking to leave Ventura, but as has been witnessed here, I do think about other places. But Ventura allows that. It senses that many of its residents are from other places and those places are still in our minds. It gives us space to still explore whatever we want about them, and it doesn't mind because we are here. We chose Ventura.

I loved the photos in that book, and besides these quotes, there were others also in the book that impressed me just as much that I only copied down the authors and where the quote came from in order to find where those stories appeared and to hopefully find them in other books so I can read them in full. Those authors and titles are in my phone, and that's going to take a little while. But I don't mind. The South is a significant part of who I am, not the typical South as others know it, but Southern as I know it, as I carry it within me.

So here I sit with a Ventura College sticky note with four titles on it, including one I found a little while ago in the college library catalog called Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture by Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon, from the University of North Carolina Press in 2001. I desperately want to read that one because I know some of that culture. I've lived it. I wish for that ease that porches bring, but I find it in other things here, including my home library at Ventura College. So that suits me.

But here is this list. And there on my shelf is not only the new Tom Brokaw book, but also How the Post Office Created America, Ten Restaurants That Changed America, and two others I had intended to read during winter break, when the campus, and therefore the library was closed, but never got to them because public library books horned in, including ones on Interlibrary Loan. I think I would like to read them now, but there's the South calling to me in those books. Is it strong enough to prevent me chucking them to the side if something else comes along that sparks my interest? Is my Southern heart stronger than that? I'd like to think so. I hope so. These ones reach me deeply, pull at me hard, beckoning insistently. Here is where I once was and I need to go back to it. I need to know more.

I used to think that I could pick only one, that it was either New York City (even though I haven't seen as much of it as my parents and ironically don't have a great desire to go beyond perhaps seeing the FDR Presidential Library and Museum some day in Hyde Park, and Strand Book Store on Broadway in New York City) or Ventura and therefore more of California history, or my origins in the South. We only have so much time to live as it is, but as it happens, I don't think it's a crossroads of the heart with me. I go down one road for a bit, turn around, and go down another one. Yet, with those quotes above and what I read in that book, the South in those words is how I want to write, how I want to live in my books to come. So maybe more of that. But the others can remain. I'm not sure yet whether I'll read what I checked out from the college library, or return them all (except for the Brokaw book) and start over. But based on what I've found there, and that F209 in the library beckons so wildly to me, I think I'll be with it for quite a while. This is the road I'll take for some time in order to reacquaint myself with that Southern storytelling tradition, which may also be in me at this very moment, to be unearthed in whatever story feels right. I don't know, but I know this feels right, right now. Hopefully longer.

Where Are You in Your Mind?

Last night, while trying to get to sleep, I fretted about having so many ideas for nonfiction books and adult novels and YA novels and picture books and still more, and yet I haven't made much headway on any of them. Not out of laziness or ambitions being bigger than my abilities, but I guess it's the paralysis of choice. At least in the way I saw it before thinking about it more this morning.

I wish I could live in a library. Not necessarily a public library. Probably a college or a university library on a sprawling campus (the best kind), with enough space for regular exercise, walking and perhaps eventually even jogging, and a supermarket nearby, maybe some fast-food joints, a bookstore here and there (not only on the campus) to see what's being sold in the area based on what's continually in stock, and perhaps a movie theater or two. In this, I think about Lied Library on the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) campus, which is all on Maryland Parkway, which I consider the most vibrant corridor in Las Vegas, which, if continued to be developed properly, could be one of the great hopes for the city perhaps being known a little more for something else than what it already is and always has been. Further down is the Boulevard Mall, which includes 99 Ranch Market, Goodwill, Ross, Seafood City, which is the local Filipino supermarket, and a Wing Stop Sports bar which, if you know Wing Stop, is much larger than your average Wing Stop, with lots more individual tables, TWO soda dispensers, an honest-to-god bar with alcohol, which is considered amateurish by Vegas standards, and big flatscreen TVs all around. I would have wanted to live at Lied Library, if not for the extreme desert heat and cold that I endured for five years. But that library, my god. Not only was there always more than enough room to walk the UNLV campus, but in the two times I was there as a substitute library aide at Paradise Elementary, which is also on the UNLV campus, I got lost on my way back from Lied Library to the school, before starting work there at 10:30 a.m. Both times, I didn't think I'd get there on time.

The stacks inside Lied Library are so massive that they're located on three successive floors, four if you count the serpentine design of the Leisure Reading section on the first floor, which I never noticed until the final time I was there, as part of our family's farewell tour of Las Vegas, which was cut short at the Wynn on another day when the movers called and said they were going to come to move us out on Sunday, and it was Friday. I was impressed by the sheer number of interesting titles in the Leisure Reading section, which, being in a university library, was far more extensive than Ventura College has in its Leisure Reading section, but it's no less interesting here.

The stacks with call numbers A-HJ are on the third floor, HM-PR on the fourth floor, and PS-Z on the fifth floor, all under the jurisdiction of the Library of Congress classification system. And with what they have, with all the presidential history books I could ever want, translated novels from different countries, every subject that could pop to my mind on a given day (from architecture to music history (especially 1970s music) to various biographies and memoirs and still more), I could easily spend the rest of my life there if such a thing were possible.

And yet, there are other libraries throughout the country, too, such as the New York Public Library (the main, famous one) and other university libraries which very possibly hold as much, if not more as Lied Library. Chances are many of them do, though. It would serve to make me indecisive, but there are considerations which limit me, such as weather. Nothing on the east coast since it gets too cold in winter. Same with the Midwest and in the Great Plains, tornadoes and such, so I wouldn't want to root myself there either.

But that's what it comes down to: Roots. I don't have any. We moved so many times throughout Florida, twice in Santa Clarita (although we did end up in Saugus for eight years, after our first year in Valencia, but there wasn't much in Santa Clarita that made me feel rooted, although I do miss Stater Bros. supermarket), and five times in four years in Las Vegas, owing to various bleak circumstances, such as neighbors next to us and above us smoking constantly and the smoke seeping into our apartment, which caused us to move out after that year), as well as last year at Via Ventura here in Ventura, which ended with our dogs having a massive flea problem because they never properly treated the grounds, and now at the new Island View Apartments, behind the Ralphs supermarket. It's interesting, what with a fourth-floor rooftop deck that takes in a lit-up view at night of Oxnard and Camarillo, further to the west, that's far more impressive to me than the Las Vegas and Los Angeles skylines.

Therefore, to be connected to a place? To know it intimately? To feel a sense of civic pride in it? I don't know how that works, nor do I think I'd want to learn. Not that I think we'll move again so quickly, although I hope we don't, as it would be interesting lately to be in one place for more than one year, and by that I mean one apartment complex, but we didn't have a choice from Via Ventura to Island View. We had to get out of Via Ventura, which looks progressively worse and more desperate to bring in tenants since we left. Maybe there's a chance with Island View. There are a lot of problems within the apartment, which are actually much better than what we came from at Via Ventura and before that in Las Vegas. But they do take their sweet time in addressing them. When the Santa Ana winds howled through recently, an incredible draft blew through the gaps in the front door, which made the vertical blinds in front of the sliding patio door billow and I really felt it, since I sleep in the living room, my bed there and my bookcases nearby, towards the back door (it's a two-bedroom apartment, so my parents have the master bedroom, and my sister has the other bedroom). I like it because my TV serves as the living room TV and I've got the kitchen right there. What more could I want for a room? But that front door, which is actually considered the back door by the complex, since what is actually our front door, with our number on it, faces a hallway that leads to doors that open into garages also for rent by residents, needs weather stripping. I'm guessing right now, even though the manager of the complex came with the head maintenance guy last week to look over exactly what we needed adjusted and repaired, they'll run out the clock leading up to Thanksgiving and then let it sit until after Thanksgiving. Hopefully they'll address it afterward, but it's been sitting for so long. Even so, still better from all that we came from, including a bungalow in nearby Henderson, Nevada that had shoddy, stringy carpeting, black mold behind the washer and dryer, and a leaking air conditioning unit from the ceiling that not only required us to put a bucket underneath to catch the drops, but which broke down before the hottest day of the year that year, after a few times in which the shitty maintenance crew there insisted that nothing was wrong with it. It seems to me that matters of shoddy maintenance, as well as delayed maintenance, seem to only exist in the western United States. Never had that in Florida. Can't go back, though, what with hurricanes getting worse, and as a native Floridian away for so long, I've most likely lost my immunity to the humidity.

Anyway, through all of this, it took many years to realize that books, and moreso libraries, have always been my home. I seriously considered a career in aviation, first as a commercial pilot, and then an aircraft mechanic, and then a mechanic for Air Force One, before then trying journalism, which, even though I'm proud of what I did there, I left because I didn't want to live on an ulcer farm. And it was afterward that I realized how much libraries have been there for me. I started reading when I was two years old, and I particularly remember, before Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1992 (we lived in Coral Springs, and only got the feeder bands, but they were fierce), worrying about not being able to return The Little Mermaid soundtrack on audio cassette to the Coral Springs Library, since they had closed right before it was due, and any fines that might accrue because of that. Fortunately, I don't think there were any after they reopened. I also remember ignoring my math homework from Broward Community College on Friday afternoons when I was in the Southwest Regional Library in Pembroke Pines, diagonally across from the then-tiny campus, in favor of looking for movies to watch on the weekend, which was how I discovered The Fabulous Baker Boys, starring Jeff Bridges, one of my favorite actors, which became one of my all-time favorite movies. In fact, since my dad dropped me off early at BCC before he went to work as a computer and business education teacher at Silver Trail Middle just down the street, I was always there before the library opened at 7 a.m. and spent my entire semester there before we moved to Southern California. Subsequently, I failed that college Algebra course and had to retake it when I registered at College of the Canyons in Valencia.

There are lots of other stories like that, and libraries have always been my one true home like that. Oftentimes, in my head, in my imagination, I go to those libraries I've loved. I spend time in the stacks at Lied Library, I walk through the Whitney Library on Tropicana in Las Vegas, proud at how they always consistently met the needs of that at times-downtrodden community, and reluctantly ignoring the awful, distracting tile flooring at the main Clark County Library on Flamingo, also in Las Vegas, to admire their paperback collection, as well as their eager interest in so many other subjects in the hope that others will be interested, too. I also look at photos on Yelp of the New York Public Library, as well as photos from inside other university libraries and imagine myself there. In each one, I feel like I'm home. It's why I like living in Ventura. The Ventura College Library is my favorite place in Ventura and between that and the holds I always have from various locations in the Ventura County library system, I'm never short of books.

All this helps me to not panic so much over all that I want to write and haven't begun yet. Those works can be a second home for me. Characters to meet and follow, ideas to expand on. Places in my imagination to explore, unusual things I've thought about that I wonder if others think about, and the only way to find out is to write them and see who reads them. It's more difficult, more challenging than simply opening up a book and reading, but I want to try. Our main computer here in this apartment doesn't feel as much in a dungeon as it was in that apartment at Via Ventura, so that's a start. Plus there's a lamp next to it and it actually becomes cozier at night. So there's some encouragement. Just try. Get up and try. And with enough effort, these stories I want to tell can come to feel like my life with books and libraries. Another place in my life to fondly call home. And I know it will never move.

Sondheim Through Time

On Sunday, January 26, 2014, my family and I, two years into living in Las Vegas, with three years to go, went to the Stratosphere for free admission to the Stratosphere Tower, being offered to Nevada residents for that day. We had gotten there in the early afternoon, bypassing the long, snaking line of tourists waiting to pay to get in, with the intent of staying at least through the early evening, to see a Las Vegas sunset from that vantage point and how everything begins to come alive from that point. Knowing that, I decided to bring along the biography Stephen Sondheim: A Life by Meryle Secrest, writing about one of my heroes.

Today is Sunday, January 14, 2018, 12 days shy of it being four years since I started reading that biography (I remember this because my Goodreads account, on my Currently Reading shelf, still has the listing for that biography all the way on the bottom, with that date, the oldest listing I have on that shelf). Not that the biography was bad from where I stopped (All told, I read about 30 pages while we were in the Stratosphere Tower, distracted by the 360-degree view), but since then, it's been for lack of trying, distracted by other books, wanting to stretch out what I don't know yet about Sondheim, watching Six by Sondheim countless times, as well as DVDs of two productions of Company, the original staging of Into the Woods as well as the movie, Sondheim: The Birthday Concert and a few others. It's a lot more fun to see his work in action, which has been the distraction. But still, I want to know how he came up with all those musical treasures. I've given this long weekend over to reading about some of my favorite people, and books by some of my favorite people: Phil Collins, through his memoir Not Dead Yet; this Sondheim biography (I have Sondheim's own two books, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, and I might delve into those afterward), Armistead Maupin's memoir Logical Family, and possibly The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard by David A. Goodman and Uncommon Type: Some Stories, Tom Hanks' first book, all short stories centered on typewriters.

This particular Sunday is time travel in memory at its most head-snapping. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon today finishing Not Dead Yet on the patio of our apartment here in Ventura, in unseasonably warm weather. On weekends, when we're not out, Dad tends to watch marathons of The Golden Girls and while a great deal of it is well-written, I get sick of hearing it all the time. So to the patio I went, unfolding the sole brown lawn chair we have out there.

And yet, on that Sunday in 2014, I had a jacket on, even inside the tower because we were planning to go outside, to where some of the tower's main attractions were, namely Insanity, which dangles riders out over the Strip while furiously spinning around, and X-Scream, which plummets riders to the edge of its tiny track, and then rises up and pushes them back, doing it a few times. Next to the exit of Insanity is the best view of some of the rundown apartment buildings surrounding the tower. By that time, we had moved twice already, from the Valley Vista All-Age Mobile Home Park on Cabana Drive in Las Vegas, to the Pacific Islands Apartment complex in Henderson, all the way in the back, blessedly removed from traffic noise, but cursed by heavy smokers in the apartments above us and next to us, which seeped into our apartment. The complex did nothing about it because "everyone has the right to do whatever they want to do in their own apartment." However, after the remodels they did of the apartments as they became vacant, which surely cost them a pretty penny, I wonder how they feel about that now.

I started reading Stephen Sondheim: A Life when we had found seats in front of one section of this view, in the distance the screams of those bungee-jumping from the top of the tower (we got near to that area, too, and watched the process over and over and over. The ones who set up those were jumping were impressively precise. This wasn't a careless, cigar smoke-filled attraction. There were real lives involved in this and those employees were aware).

The view was overlooking Dad's school then, Fremont Middle, and this is where we would be for a while. Because of the offer, and the visitors in that long line coming up here, the tower was crowded, so you get seats where you can find them. And this was good enough. I was paying attention to what I was reading about Sondheim's childhood, about the indeed separate lives of his parents, but not as attentive as a fawning fan should be. Of course, it was the view, one that's impossible to see anywhere else like this in Las Vegas. I didn't imagine myself as Godzilla, stomping all over the city. I hadn't gotten to that point yet, when living in that valley became harder. I was just amazed at how far the concrete horizon spread. It didn't feel as crowded as Los Angeles looks from a similar height, but it was insistent. Bring in the tourists, let them leave, but try to pen in at least some of the residents because a great deal of them will still get away. As it was for us.

This Sunday, in 2018, I began rereading the beginning of the biography on our first patio, on the left side of our apartment (the one on the right side of our apartment gets too dirty too quickly, with pigeon feathers from those nesting in the crevices that the roof line of these apartments offers, as well as the pigeon shit that falls onto the patio from up there. This complex is none too quick to try to rectify the apparent health problem that could result from that), a corner view that faces part of Telephone Road, as well as a view of those walking on the sidewalk across the street, in front of the Peppertree Condominiums. When the temperature is as warm as it was today, and the wind is wispy and just a little bit talkative, it's perfect. Yesterday had the best weather we've had in five months of living here, and today was just a bonus.

It's quite a distance from trying to grab seats wherever they became available in the Stratosphere Tower. This town is much quieter than Las Vegas could ever hope to be in certain parts, so besides why I started the Sondheim biography this weekend, it's also the perfect atmosphere for it. I can concentrate here. I'm not distracted by any such view, nor any potentially drunken souls (none of that either where I live), nor any constant clamor to buy souvenirs (I had my fair share even while living in Las Vegas. I had two t-shirts listing the names of all the casinos on and off the Strip, myriad sets of playing cards, and I still have my Cosmopolitan t-shirt from before the faceless new owner, the Blackstone Group, killed off its confident, artsy spirit). Sure, walking around the inside floor of the Tower and outside where those rides are is not exactly the best place to be reading a significant biography of Sondheim. I know that. But for that many hours, usually seeing what there is to see in less than an hour and then picking out what I like the most to spend more time with, it just seemed reasonable to bring a book in case there was a stretch of time that I wanted to say that I had read a little something in the Stratosphere Tower. I might well have been the first person to bring a book there, knowing the tourist value of the place. That always worked better at Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat at the Mirage, where it became my tradition to bring Paper Towns by John Green with me to read (I wasn't as into the place as Meridith was because of the dolphins, but I loved that relaxed atmosphere that encouraged visitors to sit a while if they wanted and worry about nothing), but here, why not have the chance to sit in front of one of the windows offering that expansive view, read for a bit, and have that view to look at for a while. I think it could elevate a great many novels.

I know that's not what Las Vegas is for, for pretty much everyone who comes to visit. In fact, it's not even what it's for for most of those residents. But for me, it was just to have a moment of artistic accomplishment in front of me in the way of that biography, to read about how someone else did it. I don't have the same ambitions as Sondheim, although I do want to write a few plays, but my admiration for him is boundless.

And here, in Ventura, it feels like a universe away from Las Vegas, and that's how I like it. There's more time in this town to simply be, to explore whatever you feel like in books, in being on the beach, in strolling downtown, whatever you can think of. Vegas always threw everything at you, all at once. It wasn't as frenetic as Los Angeles, but if it wasn't work you were worrying about, it was the weather (it was frigid that January, hence the jacket), or when to go food shopping (especially in the summer at 110 degrees, when you had to go as late into the night as possible so the milk would last until you could get it home), or the cigarette-smoking neighbors on their patio whose smoke always drifted right to where you could walk out into the rest of the neighborhood, and so much else. This town is better for the rest of Sondheim. I can read about his life more seriously here.

Perhaps one of the reasons I hadn't read much of the Sondheim biography that Sunday in 2014 is because it was the one time in what became five years in Las Vegas that the city felt completely calm to me. I could look at it from above and feel like maybe, just maybe, I could manage to live here. Of course, that was before the cigarette smoke in our apartment got worse, and before we moved a few more times within Henderson. But for that one day, it was possible, although I do think it was the first time I had seen any city from such a height, 1,149 feet up. It even made Las Vegas seem reasonable. Seem. The reality never matches it. It's at least better here.

Thanksgiving at the Ventura College Library

In just two months, from last September (I needed to have proper ID first, through my driver's license), I've gone from having only the Green Valley Library on N. Green Valley Parkway in Henderson, Nevada, to reveling in having regular access to two libraries: The E.P. Foster library in downtown Ventura (part of the Ventura County library system), and the Ventura College Library, formally known as the Evelyn and Howard Boroughs Library. The latter library is the object of my most current fervent desire.

My sister and I went there last Tuesday, walking up to an enormous, grayish structure, the outside of which always reminds me of the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas. Just the way one part of the building curves around in gray and red. The Ventura College Library has almost the same feature, except that curving features long windows, and what looks like criss-crossing pipes.

At the automatic double doors that open onto the HUGE computer lab at the left, and in front of the stairs that go to the library on the second floor, there was a notice on the window next to the doors that said the library would be open on Monday, November 20 from 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Tuesday, November 21 from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., both days without a librarian available. I'd say that's ok as long as someone's there to check out books that anyone might want. I don't have to go again for a while anyway since I have my five, which is the limit not only for "community members" like me, as stated in the policies, but also for students, which I was surprised to learn because I figured that they would have unlimited access during the academic year. Go figure.

Under those hours on the notice was the announcement that the library would be closed from Wednesday through Sunday (it's normally closed on Sundays anyway, except for during the summer, when it's closed from Friday through Sunday).

After I read that, I needed a minute before we walked in to go up the stairs. I had never felt such envy in a long time. If only I could have access to the library then, which I know is impossible since I don't have any association with the people who could make it happen, and even then I don't think it would happen.

I'm just thinking about it in my imagination: The entire campus empty (it's an unassuming, small campus that isn't concerned with much on a given day), and the library completely empty except me and all those books.

When you walk in, there's the librarian's desk, big and round and can easily be at home on any starship. To the immediate right is the leisure reading sections, which are good for being surprising once in a while. Back in September, when I could finally get my Ventura College library card after we had gotten our driver's licenses in Santa Paula (with the same numbers that we had left behind after we moved to Las Vegas), I knew that the library had a copy of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See, which I had wanted to read since it was published in March, but was stymied by there being so many holds on the copies the Henderson Libraries had. Finally, I would have my chance. And I did, thanks to that leisure reading section.

Lately, my sister wanted to read Endurance, the memoir by astronaut Scott Kelly, and she was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a copy to reach her in the Ventura County library system. Still waiting, when we went to the college library. After we returned the books, we went to the leisure reading section, as we always do, and while she was looking on those shelves to see if there was anything really new, I found a copy of Endurance sitting on top of the stacks. She was overjoyed when I showed it to her.

But generally, having been with this library in the past two months, the leisure reading section is generally anemic. Not that I expect them to get every single new title that comes out that I want to read, but you'll find much of the same stuff sitting atop the stacks, soon after moved to the shelves below, but not much there that could be exciting to have found or bumped into. Granted, Lied Library at the University of Nevada Las Vegas always had a phenomenal leisure reading section, but it's in that memory that I have to be aware: That was a university library. University. Seemingly endless budget. Ventura College is a community college in a small town. Much smaller. The population is smaller. The college has to scrape and snarl and growl for a bigger budget from the legislature in Sacramento. Not everything is going to be so readily available or so immediately fascinating as it was at Lied Library. However, beyond wishing for a few more intriguing titles in the leisure reading section, Lied Library's selections didn't make a difference to me anyway because I never went to that library often. Yes, I could have gotten there if it was one of my family's weekend errands, but the traffic to get to Maryland Parkway every time usually wasn't worth it. And then, I would have had to keep close watch on when the books were due, knowing that there would be a three-week limit and only two renewals allowed. Then it would always have been on a weekend because Dad worked during the week, and so did me and my sister for that matter. But yes, I do wish that the Ventura College Library had all five volumes of the Collected Works of William Howard Taft, like Lied Library has. Nevertheless, it's ok that it doesn't.

But now, I can get to the college library whenever I want. All it takes is a ride on the 6 bus across from the Government Center (or the 10 or 21 if they show up before the 6. I'm only ever concerned about getting on the 6 if I'm going to the Foster library in downtown Ventura) and it pulls right up at the corner, across from the library. All I have to do is get up and walk a few yards to the entrance. There it is, all for me. It's a fair trade-off from Lied Library, which, until that final farewell visit before we moved back to Southern California, I hadn't been to in months anyway.

On the right side of the library is the reference stacks, and there are a few culinary history volumes I'd want to read a bit of if I had the library all to myself during those Thanksgiving-fueled days. I know I can't possibly read all the books the library has, not with 63,529 books, nor would I expect to. But just to be among them, to be able to feel free to wander as I wish.

Right now, I've decided to dig into philosophy, and instead of one of those overview books that profiles the major philosophers, and even not-so-major but still notable for one thing or another, I'm picking at the philosophy section in the college library at random, whatever catches my eye.

On Tuesday, it was the Second Series of Jiddu Krishnamurti's Commentaries on Living, since the library doesn't have the first volume. It's him talking with people from all walks of life, and it looked interesting enough to me. Depending on how it is, I may go back next time for the third volume (I know exactly what it is), or go at random again and see what I come up with.

I can't stand that I can't be in that library during those days, but I will definitely be there in my imagination. There are World War II books I haven't even touched yet, as well as Stephen Ambrose's biography The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. There are the Civil War books I might dip into, as well as some general books on the American presidency that I just found on my last visit.

And that's not even getting into the literature sections, with all their attendant letters, short stories, and so many novels that I guarantee are truly discoveries, a lot of obscurities on those shelves. You won't find any hype on those shelves, and that's how I like it for my own browsing.

It's just the thought that here I am, educating myself, on a college campus but without having to be of a college campus. I love college and university campuses anyway, and lived for Fridays at 3:50 p.m. when I was a student at College of the Canyons in Valencia, California. That time marked the end of my cinema class for the week and the campus was very nearly empty, so I could walk its lengths for a little while, feeling like I owned it.

To have the Ventura college library to myself for those days would be paradise. And I know exactly where my next books are, starting from those and moving on to whatever captivates me next. Pure bliss.

Westgate Book Exchange

I was only at the Westgate Book Exchange, on West Charleston Boulevard, next to M&M Soul Food Cafe, once, which may explain why it's gone now. We went to West Charleston here in Las Vegas to try M&M Soul Food Cafe, and when we left, I drifted next door to Westgate. I am always pulled to stores that have extensive book collections, including the Goodwill in downtown Ventura, which I count as half a bookstore because of the huge wall of books it has near the register.

This one had rows upon rows of well-organized paperbacks, and there's even a photo on its old Yelp listing showing exactly that. I loved how whoever ran this shop had the mysteries organized so well, and while I don't read them often, I always want to find something markedly different when I'm in the mood. Hence this one that I'm reading right now which came from the Westgate Book Exchange: Flamingo Fatale: A Trailer Park Mystery by Jimmie Ruth Evans.

In our first year in Las Vegas, we lived in a mobile home park way down the street from Sam's Town, and though that's not quite the same as the trailers featured in this mystery, I know the atmosphere. I know the people. I know how loud the irritable, battling Lundys got toward each other diagonal from us. They didn't even have to be in their screened-in patio, and you could hear them. But they were history. They had been there since 1992, when Valley Vista All-Ages Mobile Home Park opened. It's under new ownership now, a different name, but I'll bet that the Lundys are still there, still sore at each other, still sitting in that screened-in patio on those rare quiet nights, looking over their tiny kingdom.

I know the Christmas decorations, how elaborate some of the neighbors got, and especially before, at Halloween, when one mobile home made it positively atmospheric. Not just the usual cobwebs and the fake bats, but dry ice fog for that night, with an almost-supernatural tinge.

So this mystery is definitely for me, but this is the first time that I've opened it since I bought it, an eventually futile attempt to read a great deal of what I have that's not part of my permanent book collection before we move. We're looking to move with as little as possible, not just for cost, but because Ventura has so much to offer for us, from antique stores to the bookstores I will most certainly frequent. Right now, I have a yen for world-class pianist Oscar Levant's books, but I don't want to search for them online. I've done so much of that in the past four years and had so many books shipped to me, simply because the only available bookstore nearby was Barnes & Noble on Stephanie here in Henderson, and my absolutely local library (located on the same side of the street as my apartment complex, though about 15-20 minutes to walk there) doesn't offer much that's truly adventurous, and certainly not that.

I want to browse those bookstores, seeking nothing in particular, but keeping Levant's books in the back of my mind on the off chance that I happen upon them. I want to give my money to the town, to support these businesses so they'll stay open. Salzer's, which has its music store on the left side of the turnpike, and its DVD rental store on the right side of the turnpike, has been open since the '70s, and in its current location since 1985, at least the video store side. Its owner, Jim Salzer, looks like if Derek Jacobi had spent his entire life in Southern California. That's where I want to be, in person, always in person. I'll rent from them once in a while, surely, and browse as often as I intend to haunt those bookstores.

Mostly, I carry over my experiences. I'm hoping for bookcases as well-organized as those that were at the Westgate Book Exchange, but a cozier atmosphere. I want to disappear into those lined-up books again, only emerging when I've found what I think will suit me. I think about G.W. Bookstore in Palm Springs, when we visited in October 2006, staying at what was then Hotel Zoso (now a Hard Rock Hotel), for the California Business Education Association conference for my dad. I remember walking in and finding a Vintage International Edition copy of The Remains of the Day from October 1993, when the movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson was released. I looked at the receipt I still have from G.W. Bookstore, an otherwise blank receipt, without the name of the bookstore, and I find that I bought it on October 9, 2006. I remember that the owner of the bookstore looked like he lived there, and it wouldn't have surprised me. I want to live like that.

Since Westgate closed, a few other independent-minded bookstores deep in the Las Vegas Valley have also closed. This is not a reader's town, I know, but it's still disappointing, given all the possibilities for when people are forced indoors by the horrid heat such as we're dealing with right now. Libraries should be even more open at this time of year, and some are, I've seen, but still not enough. This should be a storyteller's town, too, where people gather to tell their stories from places they've lived. Perhaps contests. Perhaps not. But just to gather around and fill this desert with memories of other places, other experiences, other excitements, other anything. I never had the ambition to try to establish anything like that here given all that we'd lived through in these four years, these four hard years that have seemed so long and yet, just the other day, I was thinking about when we first got here, and the next minute, here I am. Four years older. Surprised at the speed now.

Unfortunately, most of the stories I've seen here take on the same themes, in gambling, in drinking, never much in wonder, in creativity, in eccentricity. The Electric Daisy Carnival, which is happening this weekend, is the place for it, but I'll wait for the YouTube clips, and finish watching the documentary Under the Electric Sky, about the 2013 Electric Daisy Carnival, which I saw from my mobile home, at least the lighting being tested a few nights before it started. Huge beams of light flashing on and off and on and off and in different colors, and waving around, and it was like a promise that here you will find the freedom you seek, the life you've always wanted but never had the courage to go for. You can have it there, at least for three nights. It means many things to me, and I love the at times ethereal music, but I couldn't go out there as those hundreds of thousands of brave souls are doing at this very moment, trekking out to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway while it's well over 100 degrees today, and set to get even worse during the weekend, with 112 degrees and 113 degrees. Even in the dark, it'll still be 95 degrees. I don't envy them that, but I look forward to seeing how it turned out in photos and in videos.

No, my life now is in these bookstores, these libraries. I will be more mindful of my collection because there will likely be times I head there on my new bicycle (hopefully to work as well, which I plan to after I buy it in Ventura), and can't carry as much with me as a car trunk can. It establishes priorities, though. What do I want the most right now? Besides everything? What do I want to read right now? What's important enough for me to shoulder in the bag I'll be carrying with me while riding? Not many 900-page epics, I'm sure.

I wish the Westgate Book Exchange was still around, so I could see it at least one more time. But maybe, in light of these lifestyle changes, it's probably better that it isn't. I would dive into it again and come out with more than I should have before moving. At first, I will miss those days, but this is teaching me to relax with it. It will be there, but just be sure to visit often so it stays open. I will gladly support all the bookstores and libraries in Ventura. It's a start, on the way to knowing more about the town.

14,000 things to be happy about. by Barbara Ann Kipfer

Saturday was a banner day for this book lover at the Deseret Industries Thrift Store on East Flamingo Road, not so much for this book lover who's moving in a few months.

Therefore, I found four Indiana Jones novels to join The Peril at Delphi, which I hadn't started yet, but I knew I wanted to read more after this one. I also found Not Quite Dead Enough by Rex Stout, one of the Nero Wolfe series, and Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein. At the same time I found the Heinlein book, I was also holding James Herriott's Dog Stories, but the paperback copy looked deeply aged, and to me, it's the kind of book to possibly bump into at one of the three bookstores in downtown Ventura. Either that or the library there.

I had also spotted a fat paperback called 14,000 things to be happy about. by Barbara Ann Kipfer. I flipped through it, found various things that have made Kipfer happy in a list on one page after another, 14,000 in all obviously. An amusing idea, but not much use to me, it would seem.

Then today happened. We went back to the thrift store because Dad had found a blue desk he wanted, but hadn't been very vocal about it until yesterday. That's what determined that we would go back today, and after Dad got home from work (I'm free, by the way, practically finished at Cox Elementary as its library aide. I cashed in the rest of my vacation days and my personal days, and the only day I have to show up again is the last day of school for students and support staff. I will use these coming weeks wisely in reading, writing, and movies I've wanted to see for a long time, as well as preemptively throwing things out, donating others, and arranging the rest for packing when it comes time), we went back.

14,000 things to be happy about. stuck in my mind when we got there and I went looking for it after we found out that the blue desk was gone, another desk in its place. Items at Deseret Industries pass through Las Vegas quicker than people do. Fortunately, the book was in the same place that I put it back, and I looked closer at that. Kipfer's introduction essentially states that this book is a product of 20 years of first writing down in a "tiny spiral notebook" things that made her happy, through larger notebooks and finally to personal computers, from sixth grade to 1990, when this book was published.

I flipped the pages again, looking at what had made her happy in very few words: A white-gold sunrise. Late Sunday breakfast. Loud radios. Night lights. Eating the right food. And still more. 13,994 more.

In my permanent book collection is a copy of The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, which is to me today what Andy Rooney was to me when I was 11. Andy Rooney taught me that you can write about anything so long as you make it interesting enough. Woodworking, the interior design of fast-food restaurants, his experiences in World War II all were fascinating to me because he made them interesting to read. The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency touts on the cover "On the Implausibility of the Death Star Trash Compactor" and "Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)", which teaches me that you can go even further, twisting a famous work to another perspective to make people laugh and also say "Hey, I never thought of it like that!"

So I bought 14,000 things to be happy about., surprisingly the only book I bought at Deseret Industries today, but I couldn't find anything else I wanted as badly as the Indiana Jones novels, the Nero Wolfe novel, the Heinlein novel, and the first volume of Dwight D. Eisenhower's memoir of his White House years, from 1953 to 1956. Plus, looking over the paperback shelves again, I saw that I cleaned them out of all the Indiana Jones novels they had.

The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency is my Bible, for inspiration on how I should approach my work, thinking about other ways in which a story can be told or which a blog post can be written, looking for the way that suits me. In that vein, 14,000 things to be happy about. will be my second Bible. Sure it's one person's epic list of what makes them happy, but many of these things make me happy, too. But for me, it's not about reading the list and being happy about those things. Whenever I look through this book, it will be to find something to write about, most likely for this blog. For example, overdue library books. I don't know why that makes Barbara Ann Kipfer happy, but I can write about my experience with them as a public library patron, and also working at Cox Elementary, where overdue books weren't such a factor, so long as students returned them some time, preferably before the end of the year, although with the librarian I worked with, it became an unnecessary federal case every time. After all, most returned their books so that they could get more, which was the policy there.

Or railroad stations. There's the one in San Juan Capistrano that you walk past to reach that dirt road with those small houses lined up at the side, acting as either souvenir stores, tea houses, or historical societies. With those overhanging trees across the road, it's where part of my soul lives. I could write about that some time, too.

But also, looking at these things in this book, I can also wonder why these things make Kipfer happy, perhaps even what they were since I don't know what many of them are, and I can also reach as far back in my memory as I can for some of them.

I'm not sure if I'll use the book title to mark these posts, but if you find more than the usual number of posts per month in this blog, you'll know why.

A Tradition Ends, Interrupted

I should have remembered, from when the darkening clouds threatened rain in Pembroke Pines, Florida on the day that we set out to move cross-country to Valencia, California in 2003, which took five days with two dogs and two birds and therefore, sadly, no time for New Orleans, even though we did pass through Louisiana and were most likely close enough in our route.

I should have also remembered when we moved from Saugus, California, also in the Santa Clarita Valley, and that early morning, there were those same clouds, before we moved to Las Vegas.

When we do move from Las Vegas in the coming months, back to Southern California, I don't think those same clouds will be there, because we'll be reaching the extreme heat of summer by then, and there are generally no clouds in sight during that immense hell. Yet, the city we're moving from, and really any city or town we've moved from, seems to sense that we're on our way out, that our daily attention is on what we have to do in errands and eating and working, but in the back of our minds, we're already driving out of here, to where the weather's more reasonable, to where we hope our lives will be more reasonable.

Yesterday, we did go to Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat at the Mirage. Locals are also being charged for parking now. At the end, it was $10 for four hours, but that hardly mattered. This was for Meridith, who loves dolphins, and has loved all the times we've gone there, especially when she had the chance to paint with dolphins for her birthday and has never forgotten Maverick, the dolphin she painted with, even going so far on this likely final visit to ask where he was. While the trainer gamely tried to say that he was isolated for the time being, she and my mom could read between the lines that it was breeding time, and so Maverick would likely find it more fun than performing for the tourists.

This time, however, a little over 60 degrees of cold met us and despite not finding anything on the weather websites I visit, or hearing about it on the news, it did rain. It drizzled at first, and then later on, when Mom and Dad decided to go back inside the Mirage, it was raining steadily. I thought I could get away with my Jungle Book t-shirt and my heaviest blue jacket, but no luck. Even in the stands at one of those tables, the wind blew some of the rain in and it was impossible for me to finish out my tradition of reading Paper Towns by John Green while there. I only made it to page 68. A valiant effort in the cold, but still too cold to read.

I'm not disappointed that this likely final visit was shorter than the others. We began at the Mirage as tourists in 2007. It was the first casino we went to after we checked into America's Best Value Inn on Tropicana and headed out to the Strip. The Carnegie Deli there was the first time we ate on the Strip. After we moved to Las Vegas, trailers in the back of the Mirage was where we first voted in Nevada. When American Idol had a live broadcast in the Beatles Love theater at the Mirage, we were there. And the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat has always been there in between. So it's appropriate that the Mirage was the final casino we visited before we moved. We've come full circle at our home casino. I'm glad for that.

I'm also not disappointed that I didn't finish my tradition. I don't know if by the weather the city was objecting to our leaving, that, to Meridith, it was showing that the dolphins were sad that she's leaving, because the city doesn't really care like that. But maybe it was getting the rain aspect of our moving out of the way nonchalantly, dismissively. "Oh, here you go. Here's what you've been through every time. Now you can leave and someone else will replace you where you're living and we'll be none the wiser and it won't matter." It doesn't seem to anyway.

It appears, though, that MGM Resorts charging for parking is not a positive move for them. There were far less trainers there yesterday than there had been during past visits, and sure, it might have been because of the rain, but I shouldn't think that would matter. Even at Bellagio, before the corporation began charging for parking, people were aware of the plan to the extent that Bellagio cut down the budget for the gardens and conservatory that people walk through to see the Christmas decorations or the Chinese New Year decorations and the last time we went, before paid parking began, it was clear that they had to scale back that budget because the profits just weren't there like they had been before.

I think that if you charge for parking, people have heightened expectations of why they're there. They want to have a good time with what they're paying, and the casino had better deliver. I suspect they're not delivering like they once did because they don't have the profit to back it up now, and so people are probably leaving disappointed at having paid however much they did for parking and whatever else they paid for, and getting a ho-hum experience. So they've either gone to other casinos that do charge for parking but might hold up their end of the bargain (ironic word, I know), or they're avoiding Las Vegas entirely and traveling throughout other cities, like Orlando maybe. They want to be tourists in cities where those cities appreciate tourists, not try to drain them dry and leave them wondering just why the hell they came there in the first place. That's for the residents, like us, though in our defense, Santa Clarita was no longer feasible, and we couldn't go back to Florida, because of the hurricane insurance and the hurricanes, in that order. We were trying to make a home here, even putting to the side for a time what bothered us about the place, although those problems gradually came as the years went on, and then they hit full-force later on.

The one highlight of our visit, however, was being in the underground viewing area, and seeing the rain from underneath the surface of the water in the pools. After Mom and Dad went back to the Mirage, Meridith and I went down there, and spent a little while watching the dolphins, especially hoping to capture video of a dolphin leaping out of the water and diving back in, creating a vortex in the water so Mom could see it (we did). Only after we could see the rain subsiding by less drops on the surface did we go back up and back to the Mirage. I'm glad to have at least seen the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat one more time. To me, it was the most relaxing place in Las Vegas and I appreciate it for having done that every time. Not so much this time, I know, but it was worth it all the other times. It was a sanctuary, an escape from the difficulty of living here, and it sought to remind you of that at every moment. I appreciate that. And it sends me back to Southern California a little gentler than I have been here, but not by much. I'll leave it to Southern California to smooth out the rest.

The End of a Tradition

This Sunday will likely mark our final visit to Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat at the Mirage, ahead of moving back to Southern California. It will also be the first and only time we'll pay for parking on the Strip, which I still maintain was a huge mistake, considering that that's where the majority of tourists in Las Vegas go, and it doesn't pay to be greedy about where or how long they park their cars.

This visit is once again courtesy of the Clark County School District, which has on its Teacher Appreciation Week page coupons for various activities, including free admission for a teacher and a guest at the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. As with the last two times, the people at the ticket booths only care that you have a CCSD ID and my dad, a high school teacher, does, as well as me and Meridith. So we four will have no trouble getting in.

I think this is mainly for Meridith, who loves dolphins, but it's also for the rest of us because it's quite possibly the most relaxing spot in Las Vegas, the one place I've found here that is complete peace. I like seeing the dolphins, and even glancing at the tigers and other animals in the Secret Garden section in the back, but I love just sitting at a table in the shade, preferably near one of the dolphin pools, reading. And I've done that in all the times we've been there. In fact, this post follows a tradition I started in 2014, which you can read here.

Briefly, back then, I read The Fault in Our Stars, which got me hooked on reading John Green's other novels, and Paper Towns followed, on the day that we were celebrating Meridith's birthday at the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat, in which she got to paint with the dolphins. Of course, I was there to see that, but in the other blank times during the day, I was reading Paper Towns, sitting exactly where I wanted to sit, reading in one of my favorite places in Las Vegas.

The next time we went there, I brought Paper Towns with me again, and I think by that time, I had my own copy. That next time was before the movie was released in July 2015, and of course I saw that in theaters. And I like the movie as equally as the book.

So here we are again. As is my tradition, I will bring Paper Towns with me again. And just like those other times, I'll probably read it cover to cover yet again. Thinking back to those other times with Paper Towns at one of those tables near a dolphin pool in the shade, I realize that my experiences at the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat, with that near-spiritual peace, with Paper Towns, was rare stability in this valley. It wasn't just an hour, or an hour and a half, or two hours. It was the entire day. And in fact, it's why we plan to get there before 10 a.m. when they open. They're open from then until 5 p.m. and we're going to be there the entire time. It's one of the few places here that has meant so much to us, and certainly one of the flew consistently reliable places. I don't know yet how the rest of the Mirage might have changed (we considered it our home casino, what with all we had done there before we moved to Las Vegas and afterward, which can be found in that previous linked post), but I'm absolutely sure that the atmosphere of the Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat has not changed. It'll be a proper farewell for us. And my copy of Paper Towns will always bear these many happy visits.

Libraries Shouldn't Be Hidden

I received a copy of FDR's Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance in the mail yesterday, wanting to reread it after having read The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence, author Robert Klara's latest.

I ordered it from Better World Books from Mishawaka, Indiana, through abebooks.com. When it finally came after two weeks, I was going to write to them to complain because I thought I had ordered a paperback copy. But in reading time, and having read a few books after I had ordered it, I forgot what copy I had ordered.

It turns out that Better World Books had listed this as a Former Library Book, and I think I ordered this one because it was the cheapest. But looking at this former library copy, while I am happy to have it to read again, I'm also disappointed. For while this library, whichever one it was, left its Dewey Decimal call number at the bottom of the spine, it completely blacked out its name on the title page under the Palgrave Macmillan name with very heavy permanent black marker. The barcode at the top of the back cover was marked up the same way. All that remains as proof that this came from a library besides the Dewey Decimal number is a stamped date of Mar 22 2010 at the bottom of the back flyleaf, the date the library acquired this book, with $27.00 beneath that. True, all this library thought about at the time was bring this book into its collections. It wasn't thinking about bibliophiles who might receive this book in the future, like me.

This library doesn't necessarily have to advertise. It belongs to a city, or a town, and therefore is only accountable to that place. But leaving clear where the book came from when it discarded it and sent it away would have been free advertising for bibliophiles. I wanted to know where this book came from. Perhaps I would have looked for the library's website and visited it. I would live in libraries if I could, and so this is my way of knowing other libraries outside of where I live. The black marker is so thick that I can't make out any possible letters. It could be considered a lost opportunity for this library, or library system, or it could be that they just want to be left alone. They don't want any outsiders to notice them. If so, I wish they didn't have that attitude. I would have been deferential.

Or it could be some new policy of Better World Books to black out library and town names from former library books. But then, what good would that do them? I would think that any bookseller as substantial as Better World Books would want buyers to see that their books come from so many different places. No, I'm chalking this one up to the library.

While I'm sticking to my local library's own books for the foreseeable future, I hope that the next former library book I buy is more open to me. In turn, I will be more open to it.

LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE (5:47 p.m.): I just found this e-mail in my inbox, sent late this morning:

Hello,

Thank you for your email. We work with many libraries who send their overstocked
books or old editions for us to sell. The libraries then select a local charity or
one of our literacy partners (Books for Africa, Room to Read, and The National
Center for Family Literacy) to receive a portion of the proceeds, in addition to
earning funds for their own programs. Your book came from one of those libraries. We
do ask that these libraries not make any changes to the book, apart from something
like a discard stamp, unfortunately, not all libraries follow these guidelines. I
can assure you that this is not a new policy of ours. Thanks for the support!

Sincerely,

Alexa

It's heartening to know that charities benefit from these books, and good to know that Better World Books is not responsible for this. They're as open as I always thought they were.

I'm Gonna Read Like It's 1999

After every time my editor at BookBrowse, the book review site I write for, e-mails me a .pdf file of how my latest review is going to appear in the next issue, I take stock of my reading life. What can I read to make my book reviews better? Do I fall back on Michael Dirda, one of my favorite book critics, or the books I have of Nick Hornby's reviews for McSweeney's, or both? What fiction should I be reading to make my reviews more informative? There's no guarantee that what I read in between reviews will directly relate to whatever book I'll read next for a review, but something in those books, or in the act of reading those books, could inspire an opening for a review that ties together the particular book I'm reviewing and what I thought of it, perhaps something about how the plot in that book has been done better elsewhere, and then I have an example. Or just getting better at capturing the atmosphere of a book in so few words. After all, I have a minimum of 600 words, though I prefer to go no further than 620 words. If my editor wants me to add more thoughts, it's easier to add to a small review than it is to try to whittle down a much larger one. I learned that very well when I was new to BookBrowse. Even though I had written movie reviews for 13 years up until then, and had written the occasional book review for a Southern California publication called Valley Scene Magazine, writing book reviews regularly was a bigger challenge, coupled with the worry that the owner of BookBrowse and my editor might think I'm not worth the trouble and then would tell me not to write any more reviews for them. Then where would I be for a writing outlet I could possibly enjoy?

Nevertheless, another review has come and gone, this time of Night of the Animals by Bill Broun, which I thought was a quiet masterpiece. I received the .pdf file of the final copy of my review from my editor, and here I sit again, thinking of my reading life. Dirda and Hornby have come and gone. I could fall back on that trope, but sitting in front of me is What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy by Jo Walton. I had never heard of Jo Walton until I bumped into her in the Henderson Libraries catalog and found her book. This collection of essays would be good, because as she writes in her introduction, "Reviews are naturally concerned with new books, and are first reactions. Here I'm mostly talking about older books, and these are my thoughts on reading them again."

That's true. Never, to my knowledge has BookBrowse reviewed reissues of classic or older books. It's always either what has recently been published, or what will be published in the next month or two months. Yes, my reviews are always first reactions, but is there possibly a way that I can make my reviews feel as comfortable, as casual, as knowing as writing about rereading older books? I want to read Walton's collection to find out if there's anything I can learn there.

However, after each of my reviews is put in the pipeline for publication, I'm not only thinking of how to improve my own reviews, I'm thinking sharply about what I'm reading right now, what I want to read, what I possibly should read. What I'm reading right now doesn't matter so much at the moment as what I want to read and what I possibly should read. I'm going to work backwards.

What I possibly should read is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two, which the entire world knows is the rehearsal edition script for the enormous play being performed in London's West End right now. I have it right in front of me, and it's due back at the Green Valley Library on Saturday. I can't renew it because despite there being 20 copies in circulation, there are 84 holds behind me.

I like wandering this wizarding world, but I'm not a devoted fan enough to drop everything right now and read it. I could get to it midweek, since I can read 308 pages in a short time, but I don't think I'd want to rush through it like that. I'd want to take time with it. Plus, despite one book review ready for the next issue of BookBrowse, I'm reading the deeply-felt memoir Please Enjoy Your Happiness by Paul Brinkley-Rodgers, and that review is due on the 20th. Two weeks left. Fortunately, I've written the two opening paragraphs, but I still have to finish reading the book. Besides, what I've liked about BookBrowse from the start is that when I review a book, as opposed to reviewing a movie, it's just me and the book. Sure there's the press release about the book from the publicist, tucked in between the front cover and the flyleaf, but all I have to do with that is take it out and pitch it, or use it as a bookmark. I don't need to know what the book's about because I've already read what it's about when I chose it for review. I don't need to read quotes from other authors and reviewers about the book because I'm looking to form my own opinion about it. Whereas with movies, every critic is hyperaware of the summer movie season and awards season. E-mail inboxes are bombarded with press releases about this awards hopeful or that one, and publicists always eagerly ask you if you want to review this one or that one, and to reply to them if you want to attend one of the screenings. That was one of the reasons I got out of movie reviewing. It started to feel like a hamster wheel. Conversely, I've been reading since I was 2. I never want to get out of this.

What I want to read has come in different stages. There's Murder with Macaroni and Cheese, the second Mahalia Watkins Soul Food Mystery by A.L. Herbert, one of my new favorite authors. I've been waiting for this one since last year, right after I finished reading Murder with Fried Chicken and Waffles, the first one. I also have here William Howard Taft: The President Who Became Chief Justice by Bill Severn, published in 1970. One review on Amazon calls it a "decent high-school bio of Taft,".....".... written for advanced junior high or beginning high school students", but I don't care. In my boundless passion for presidential history, William Howard Taft is my favorite president to study and I'll read everything I can find about him.

That that biography is from 1970 brings up something else. I feel like we're in an age now where the latest headlines, the latest trends, the latest Pokemon to catch on one's phone matters more than history, than slowing down for a little more time to think. It bothers me a little, but it also excites me. It means I own certain things. When I saw a few people at breakfast in the lobby of the La Quinta Inn in Ventura, California that we stayed at a little over a month ago tapping away at their phones, it just meant that there was more of the lobby for me. I get more space to explore. I get more trees, more sky, more opportunity to see where air conditioners are placed around my apartment complex in relation to the apartments they blow into. I also realized that in the rush to know the latest and presumably greatest (for five minutes until the next greatest thing comes along), I get more books.

Related to my desire to write better book reviews (my editor said that this latest review is "one of your best....full of insight....well constructed (no waste of words)," but I disagree. It's not one of my favorites, and I spent most of the time worrying if I was making the right connections in the review, if the whole thing read well, if it all made sense), I got a yen to read essays again. I went to the Henderson Libraries website to look up "Best American Essays" (always my starting point for reading essays), and I found that the 2015 edition was checked out (the 2016 edition comes out in October). I then saw that The Best American Essays 1999 was available from the Paseo Verde library, so I put in a request for that. I see now that as technologically irritating as society can be today, I can wander well into the past and have some of it to myself. I'm sure that The Best American Essays 1999 hasn't been checked out in some time. So I have the space to wander through it as I wish.

It's the same with the 1930s, one of my favorite decades to study. I decided two weeks ago that I also want to read novels from that decade. I'm sure that there are others reading those same novels, but not the majority. I am a minority in literature and I like to keep it that way.

Of course, my assumptions could be wildly incorrect, but even so, would that really matter with so many Pokemon still to catch? After all, they have to be caught before the next insta trend roars in. I don't mind. Keep them coming! I'd much prefer to have the option to renew my library books if necessary. Then others can have them, if they happen to notice them.

Four-Day Fantasy Bliss

Today, I volunteered at the Green Valley Library, an unusual day for me to do it, because the library's closed tomorrow, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It's always closed Sunday and Monday because that's how it's been ever since I got here, and probably even before, during the economic crash which caused two branches to be closed (the Malcolm branch and the Galleria branch, inside the Galleria at Sunset mall), and then hours were scaled back. More recently, albeit many, many months ago, hours were taken from the Green Valley and Gibson branches in order to open the Paseo Verde branch, the flagship branch, on Mondays. So instead of the Green Valley Library opening at 9:30 a.m., it opens at 10. There were other changes in the operating hours, but I've long forgotten what they were.

Normally, I volunteer on Saturdays, but that was impossible this week. And yet, I wish I could. I wish I had keys to the library, access to the alarm codes so I could spend the 4th of July weekend there. The library would be entirely empty and only for me. I would probably have breakfast on the way there, and bring lunch with me. Of course, I could spend all day and all through the night in the Green Valley Library, but I do have family in humans and dogs and birds alike, so I couldn't be away for that long. I'd let some time pass before returning, to build up the anticipation again.

I'd walk in through the back door, put my stuff down behind the circulation counter, and shelve whatever still needs to be shelved, any holds that might be left on that cart and certainly books sitting on the carts nearest the fiction side of the library. That would take all of 20 minutes to a half hour, depending on the workload.

I wouldn't turn on any of the computers. That wouldn't make any sense to me, because I'd be there for the library, not for the accompanying technology. I love the DVD section, the nonfiction DVDs on one side and the movies and TV shows on the other, and of course the audiobooks, but I would only want the books, and enough light in which to read whatever I'd want, whatever I could find. It would be the perfect setting in which to read Country, Danielle Steel's latest novel, which I only want to read because part of it takes place at the Wynn here in Las Vegas, and I want to see how she portrayed it (It has absolutely NOTHING to do with my mom being a huge Danielle Steel fan when I was growing up, and me reading a good number of her novels in turn, out of curiosity). But on the Claim Jumper shelves, which has copies of books that have a long number of holds, these copies available only at this particular library, there's no copy of Country. Disappointing, but I move on.

There's a shiny, squashy brown leather armchair in front of the new books for children, next to the separate children's area. I think I'd spend most of my hours there, as it's very close to the reading recliner I have at home. But most important to me is getting to know the collections completely, all the books I probably have missed while restocking the various displays in the library as a volunteer, all the DVD titles I haven't seen yet that could be intriguing for some other time, and knowing all the picture books there truly are in this library, because those shelves are packed tightly There are some books that when you pull them out, two try to come out with them, either on one side or on opposite sides.

I'm not sure what books I would want to read. Part of me would just want to read in the spur of the moment, and another part of me wonders what Nero Wolfe mystery novels they have that I might have missed. There was an omnibus I had read, but I think that's the only major one there. And yet, there are also the Robert Goldsborough continuations, of which the library has a few. Perhaps it would be time to try them again. But there's also presidential history, and one or two movie books I haven't gotten to yet, and Bob Stanley's history of pop music ("Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyonce") and....and.....and.....

Then there's also the thought of what books would be in the spirit of spending four days alone in this library, books to represent in print the blissful peace I'd feel, great comfort, quiet eagerness, amazement at how many books there actually are when you have them all to yourself. I'm sure the books and other materials would want some rest during these four days, time to themselves, but I think a caretaker like me would not be a bother. Not every book gets attention when patrons are browsing. I would do my very best to give each one attention, even if it's only in lingering passing, to at least notice it. Overall, they make up a relatively hefty collection, but in getting specific with them, they're merely themselves, one after the other, each one with different stories to try, and ideas to explore. For example, I have my religion. It's books and libraries. But I'd want to see exactly how many books there are about Buddhism in the library, which I've been curious about for anthropological reasons. Also because there are times when I do feel monkish, when I would love to have a library as a monastery. I did that once, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, when I was doing research for a book that may never happen. It truly is an American monastery and heaven for a movie buff like me. I would want to see if I could capture that same monastic feeling in a library that truly serves a whole community, not just a piece of one. I think I could. Sadly, I can't live in a library (although my room sometimes come close), so this would be the next best thing.

(Speaking of that, I can now reveal this: Two weeks ago, I was hired to be the new library aide at Cox Elementary, which is in the general vicinity of my neighborhood and is very much the next best thing. I finally get to do what I want to do! I hope that this will lead to doing even more of what I want to do, which is simply to contribute everything I can give to libraries through my work for them. I should think a year and a half of volunteering at the Green Valley Library while waiting on a position there (the part-time shelver position would be enormously convenient because it would boost me to nearly 40 hours a week), and the year and a half I spent as a substitute everything in the school district, including a great many stints as a substitute library aide show that already. My new job will show it even more.)

In reality, I will never be able to get into the Green Valley Library during this July 4th weekend. My imagination will do it for me throughout the days.

Walmart vs. Smith's in Books

Four months ago, Mom and Meridith went for a haircut at a Supercuts in the Eastern Commons shopping center in Henderson, which has the Smith's supermarket as its anchor. So Dad and I decided to go to that Smith's for a few things, and after picking up bagged mixed salad, flour tortillas (for me, because I wanted to see if there was any brand good enough at it. This one was just ok), and juice, Dad went to wherever else he goes in a Smith's, and I went to the books, to see if they had anything interesting.

Books in supermarkets lean toward romance novels in small towns, some sci-fi novels outside of the usual suspects such as Star Trek, and, at least in the West, a good selection of Westerns, namely from William W. Johnstone. And there are mystery novels in sometimes whimsical settings, such as diners, coming mainly from Berkeley Prime Crime and Obsidian.

At this visit to Smith's, I indeed found one mystery novel set in a diner, called A Second Helping of Murder by Christine Wegner, which turned out to have been the second in Wegner's Comfort Food Mystery series, but I was intrigued enough by it that I didn't care that I was starting with the second novel. I wanted to read it, and I bought it, not waiting to see if the Henderson Libraries have a copy, because they usually don't, being a much smaller system than the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District. Some titles you can count on being there right away, like the latest, most widely publicized book and DVD releases, but books like this one either enter the system later, or not at all.

Then, about two months ago, before the Smith's on East Sunset Road, also here in Henderson, started undergoing a massive remodel, I went to the book section there and found Murder on Bamboo Lane by Naomi Hirahara, the first in her Officer Ellie Rush Mystery series. While it does take place in Los Angeles, with Ellie patrolling various streets on her bicycle, and while I never want to see Los Angeles again in person after nine too-long years in Southern California, I'm curious to see how it's covered by people who live there, who clearly like it better than I ever did. So I bought this one too.

This is about the average for Smith's: Every couple of months, there's a book that interests me enough to buy it, but never the hardcovers. I won't spend $19 for whatever's on the bestseller list or whatever's been highly publicized. I know that my local library will likely have those books, or chances are that I had already pre-ordered that book on Amazon and it's within an order that includes four or five other books at a shot. Amazon's not bad when you know what you want right away.

Before yesterday's visit to my favorite Walmart in the Eastgate shopping center on Marks Street, yes, also in Henderson, I can't remember the last book I bought there. I always visit every book section, seeing what's new in paperback, always avoiding the hardcovers, and usually walking away with nothing because I don't need the latest Jack Reacher novel or its reprints. That series doesn't intrigue me.

Yet, at that Walmart, I noticed The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson, billed as "The First Novel in the Longmire Mystery Series." I know that the TV series on A&E has been around for a while, but I've never watched it. And I've heard of Longmire, but never pursued the series, because I'm usually busy with other mystery series, such as Nero Wolfe by Rex Stout. But here it was. Here was the chance to see what the Longmire series was about from the start. And $5.99 for a hefty paperback is a pretty good price, a far cry from the bevy of Robyn Carr novels I usually bypass every time. So I bought it, and unlike the previously mentioned mystery novels, which still sit in my stacks unread (but I will read them soon enough), I'm going to start reading this one. The bookmark in the first page is proof of that.

(Looking at the back of both A Second Helping of Murder and Murder on Bamboo Lane, I find that both the Obsidian Mystery and Berkeley Prime Crime labels are run by Penguin. Same company, and it figures that The Cold Dish was published by Penguin too. It seems that the only time I have books from different publishers is when I pre-order them from Amazon. Walmart and Smith's seem to be for Penguin books only.)

Whether Walmart or Smith's is better for books is a draw. Smith's at least stocks more less conventional mysteries, while Walmart sticks to the standards, yet lets one like The Cold Dish into its ranks. I expect that in any couple of months, I'll find another paperback novel that interests me, and it'll either be from Walmart or Smith's yet again. But since I already have two from two different Smith's, I hope Walmart picks up the slack. It's not that I don't have enough books already, or that I don't go to Barnes & Noble whenever the mood strikes (I haven't gone lately, though). But during errands for the other parts of your life, it's good to also take care of the main part of your life.