Book of the Moment Club

As I may have mentioned at one point or another in these unrelenting ramblings of mine that I call a blog, I work at a library. For the benefit of those perusing this page who might be unfamiliar with the term, a library is the place where out of work books go to languish and die. Much like a nursing home, without the crowds of people.

Occasionaly, through the benevolance of that great god Chance, a small number of these lonely tomes might make it off their dusty shelves and out into the real world. Not the MTV the real world, but the actual real world. You may have heard of it, it's what goes on when youre not watching TV or surfing the net. Once there these books odds of being read leap from infintesimally small, to upwards of only 40 or 50 to 1 against.

Clearly a checked out library book's being read is far from a certainty, and more often than not these books, these lucky few, whose faded glory had momentarily been resurrected by the hope of their imminent return to usefulness, find that they have merely changed locations of where they gather dust, at least until a few friendly overdue notices make there way to the mail box of the library patron in question, at which point the books make their return, often unopened during the entire process, to their place on the library's shelves, bringing with them the sad stories of what really happens to library books on the outside.

Now those of you reading this obviously know how to read, unless you're having it read to you, but in that case you're technically not reading it, so I wasn't even talking to you, now was I? Plus you suck. That's right, you heard me, or more to the point you heard whoever is reading to you, you suck. I'll be your hollaback girl.

Of those who know how to read, some of you might actually enjoy doing it. I have a confession to make. I enjoy reading too. At this point you might be thinking to yourself, "Wow, this guy works in a library AND enjoys reading? How serendipitopus is that? I wonder if I changed my underwear?" The odd thing is that while I do work in a library, for some reason we are not encouraged to spend our whole work day reading. It's crazy I know. It's like working in a beer factory and finding out that drinking on the job is discouraged. The worst part is that I see all these great books come into the library everyday.

So what I'm going to do in some future installments, is throw out random book titles that look interesting to me, and if anyone has read them, they can feel free to post their thoughts on them, and if those thoughts are positive enough, I'll know I should take the time to read the book. Also, I might add some thoughts on the books I am currently reading.

Right now I'm reading a book called: "The Turk : the life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine". It's a pretty good read, and manages to mix chess, artificial intelligence, scams, edgar allen poe and napoleon bonaparte into a nice little story that doesn't take too much time, even for me, to get through. That's all for now, maybe I'll tak more about it later. Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll ramble on and on about something completely unrelated. Either way, you should go to your local library and check out some books. Maybe even read them at some point. Because library books rule.