Used Books

I get nearly all my read­ing mate­r­ial from a local used book store. An eight dol­lar paper­back costs four bucks and then because I have store credit from return­ing books there, they take another half off, so for a cou­ple dol­lars I get sev­eral hours of escapism. I mostly read mys­ter­ies, from the hard boiled pri­vate eye kind to the comic female bounty hunter kind.

Because I read a lot of the same type books and my mem­ory is addled due to age and the hun­dreds of acid trips in my younger days, all the back cover blurbs about the book are start­ing to sound the same, so that has become an unre­li­able way to choose a book. I have more than once brought home a book and about half way through it real­ized I have read it before. To increase my odds of bring­ing home a book I haven’t read is to open to a ran­dom page and read a bit, but for the rea­sons men­tioned above this is not much more effec­tive. My lat­est solu­tion to this dilemma is to take a black Sharpie and fill in the zero on page 101 in every book I bring home. This works for me. But.

The mark is not that notice­able, I don’t think, but does it bother the next per­son who picks up the book? It is surely not as bad as some mark­ings I’ve come across. In the lat­est book I’m read­ing some kindly Chris­t­ian has tried to pre­vent read­ers from inad­ver­tent blas­phemy by cross­ing out the word god­damn. It hap­pened once early on in the book and then twice later. I’m curi­ous as to why a per­son of those moral stan­dards was read­ing a book fea­tur­ing mur­der, adul­tery, gam­bling, drugs and pros­ti­tu­tion in the first place. And I won­der why they just didn’t stop read­ing after the first men­tion of god­damn, but plowed ahead to find more.