I'd Rather Read a Cereal Box

When trying to find Captain Corelli's Mandolin a few days ago, I was reminded that I need more bookshelves, because my paperback fiction collection has been pushed to the back of our double-depth shelves.

Or perhaps, one of these days, I will sit down and give some thought to maybe editing my book collection and possibly even parting with a few books. I still have my Canadian Collegiate Dictionary from the late 1980s, even though I've been looking up words online for more than a decade. And I just read in the newspaper that Oxford may be publishing only an online version of its multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary when the new edition is ready in a few years, because it doesn't expect much demand for the printed version.

     

Two books I will part with before my college dictionary: The Bitch Goddess Notebook and Little Children. The first book I bought at the airport many years ago, before I started to buy hardcover only, because the title caught my eye. (Reading a hardcover book compared with its trade paperback version is like having home-delivery food served on my own plates and with proper utensils rather than eating from styrofoam containers and with disposable chopsticks.)

The second book was a gift from a girlfriend; she had bought me half a dozen best-sellers to read when I was pregnant with my daughter. When I went to Amazon.com to add the book cover image to this post, I noticed that Little Children had been made into a film starring Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly. I'm bug-eyed.

I don't remember the details of either story or my reading experience, I just know that when I finished reading them, I thought to myself, "Wow, what a waste of my time." I must have found the plot formulaic, felt annoyed by the characters, been unimpressed with the dialogue, or all of the above.