Caterina: Book Bingeing by Caterina, thwarted Latina

I promised myself that I am going to stay away from the bargain tables, no more bulk-buying next time I visit the neighbourhood mega-bookstore/coffeeshop. Last time I came home with a bag full. Fill a bag for nine bucks was the deal. All very well in the heat of things but later I found a couple of books in the collection that made me want to hold a garage sale immediately, just to get them out of the house. Yuck, there was this one memoir by some film producer - imagine a whole book written like this: "Is this a dream? It was a nightmare. I spent about five months in London and never even saw Big Ben. I was an inpatient at the Connaught Hotel, just like a hooker, always on call." As for some of the others...Ho hum, it's not like I'm going to be reading any time soon The Journey Prize Anthology of 1992.

I traced my need to buy books by the yard. I figure I can blame the padres for this one. Twice a year, at birthdays and Christmas they would give me a tall stack of nice crisp new books. Mamita would contribute most of the ones by women writers such as Kim Chernin, Audre Lord, Toni Morrison and the like, with the occasional self-help book thrown in (she is such a therapist).

Papi gave me a lot of hardcovers. I imagine because he ran a bookstore that he was up on the very latest, and couldn't wait for the paperback editions. These books were most often by latin american writers; Cortazar, Amado, Borges, Allende, Vargas Llosa, Garcia Marquez and more, all in honour of the shared heritage (and because they were freaking good too of course).

He also gave the grand tomes. To qualify as a tome, a book should be hugely long and tremendously dense, requiring full concentration for each sentence - daydreaming while reading impossible, not even for one paragraph. Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes is a good example of a tome. The tome that got away was The Last of the Just by Andre Schwartz-Bart. I never got beyond the first, oh, finger width, of this book. I had to stop when the "just man" in the middle ages was put to death by slow torture with one drop of molten metal going into each of his bodily orifices, every day. Sigh.

Since it went on for years that I would be automatically supplied with back-up reading material, I guess it's no wonder I want a comforting stack of books on the bedside table, waiting for me to tear myself from the TV. I've been spoiled, and libraries just don't cut it. First of all they only buy the safe stuff, so yeah, if I need to read every volume Margaret Atwood has ever written, I know where to go. Madre uses a public library that actually accepts order lists of books from her. She goes to the bookstore, writes down what she wants, and hands it over to the library. BUT...she's willing to wait and I believe most of it is mystery trash of some kind or another, in other words, some genre that the library is willing to collect. I doubt they're buying her lesbian-feminist theory or anything . Then there are many books you just want for your own; which is odd when you think about it. Books are expensive, more so than a cd usually. When you buy a cd you expect to play it lots. When you buy a book you expect to read it once, even if you love it.

Hasta la proxima,

Cat.

 

(y muchas gracias a The Harvey Averne Barrio Band for Caterina's theme)

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