With the purchase of new exercise equipment – no not beer pong tables, but a weight set that took five hours to put together, my lofty plans for the library have changed.

Is it still a library if you have a weight machine in the corner? I think so, after all the books outweigh the weights. Really. The new plans are to move the television from my office into this room, to add bookshelves so that we can get our current collection off the floor, and to add a new cd player, to provide inspiring tunes to work out with. Inspiring in the “pump up the energy” sort of way.

I’ve used it twice so far, and I like the space – our library is L-shaped, and the weight machine is in the short part of the L along the windows, facing the couch, but far enough info its niche that the couch can still be extended (it’s a sleeper) should it need to be. The thick carpeting mutes the sounds and makes a lovely place for doing crunches, and the windows make the space feel like a studio.

I still wish it was my office, but I like the new use of the space, as well.

I just wish I could read WHILE lifting.

I’ve just spent several minutes teaching my popup blocker that the halo-scan comments some of my blog-buddies use are not a threat, and should be allowed. I’m quite certain I’ve done this before, but I have three computers, so maybe this one got missed.

While I’m on the subject of blog-buddies, I’d like to welcome two bookbloggers to my blogroll.

Becca, who I met through Michele‘s meet-n-greet, has opened Bookstack, and has written recently about the perfect choice of book for taking on a plane.

Carl is someone I’ve just met, when he left a comment on my regular blog. His site is called Stainless Steel Droppings, and he reviews a lot of books, especially sci-fi/fantasy type stuff. His most recent post, however, is related to To Kill a Mockingbird.

Go visit them. You’ll be glad you did.

As much as I’d love to have a zero gravity recliner. the closest I can come, at least for reading, is a tub full of lightly fragrant bubbles floating on hot water. a back pillow, and a bottle of cool water to sip.

The thing is, more and more recently, I’ve been just lounging in the tub, or getting down to really important tasks, like shaving my legs, and not actually reading.

Even so, I’ve finished reading The Amber Spyglass recently, am halfway through Amy & Isabelle and just received a book of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s newspaper columns, that I’m really looking forward to reading.

My question for You: Where do you like to read? And what’s on your reading list?

If Barnes and Nobel was closer, it might well become my second home. It’s already my favorite weekend destination. Oh, we have a library in the neighborhood, and I used to be a frequent haunter of libraries, but used books smell funny, and I don’t like to have to give things back.

We have a new Borders that is slightly closer than the B&N, but I don’t really like it as well, and no, it’s not because they serve non-Starbucks coffee. It’s just…not as warm, not as inviting, doesn’t have comfy chairs, and seems too bright somehow.

I like Half Price Books, despite the funky used-book smell, because they do encourage lingering and lounging, but they don’t generally have cafes, and I think they’re the poorer for it. Books and coffee go together. So do books and tea.

So, for now, since our town lacks ANY decent independent bookstores, I shall stick with Barnes and Nobel.
And their green comfy chairs.

You’d have thought, by listening to the intensity in his voice, that the old man was trying to find a decent New York Moving Company willing to transport a grand piano between boroughs, but no, he was merely consulting with the Barnes and Noble info-desk dude about a book he really needed to have. “Can you hold this while I run to the car to get money?” he asked? Of course the answer was yes.

A bit later I approached the desk myself, asking sheepishly, “I need you to look up a title. I know the first four words are ‘On the beach with’ but I don’t remember the rest, and I know you hate it when people do this because I managed a bookstore in college and hated it, too.”

We couldn’t find the book.

It’s from an interview with Julianna Margulies in the December 15th 2007 edition of the American Airlines magazine.

Oh, well.

Hola, everyone. I’m back from Mexico, where I barely had time to read, though I did finish The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell who also wrote Blink, and re-read a good portion of Anne Rivers Siddons’s Outer Banks because a weathered copy was in the casita and I needed something in the bathroom.

Bathroom reading is a thing. If you don’t do it, just nod, smile, and move on. If you do, well, you understand.

Friends, who were in La Paz for the holiday as well, mentioned looking at pens, and I remembered my grandfather once ordering a case of personalized pens with his name and phone number on them. I’m not a fan of ballpoint, being a retractable roller-ball sort of person, but I still have a couple of those pens.

While packing today I’ve been feeling rather like I’m planning an escape, except that all I’m escaping is the winter doldrums, and the not-even-terribly-cold weather that I really can’t complain about. I don’t really travel to escape.

I read to escape. When life feels like one endless treadmill, albeit one without the benefit of granting exercise or physical fitness, I pick up a good book. If I’m cold, I read about somewhere warm, if I’m missing the beach, I read a novel that takes place on the shore.

Sometimes I’ll make the bed with fresh sheets, brew tea, and read for an entire blissful afternoon or evening, coming out of the book mood as refreshed as if I’d been napping – perhaps more so. Other times, I’ll read in fits and snatches only, but always, always, there are words and books and pages.

It’s my favorite form of escapism.

An advertisement for Amazon’s “Kindle” e-book reader has me contemplating e-books again. I go through stages where I almost like the notion of reading via screen, keyboard and fiber cable, but then I come back to my love of printed covers and textured pages, and the fact that even the most expensive e-book reader isn’t designed for use while soaking in a tub.

(Not that conventional books are either, really.)

Somehow, I can never immerse myself into an e-book the way I can with paperbacks or hardcovers. It’s not the physical presence, as there is something to hold in either case. I think it has to do with the way we read computer text, not blinking fully and staring at certain parts of the page, being different from the way we read text on paper.

Or it could just be that I like the smell of paper, and the smell of a book should be associated with that papery scent. Dusty, dry, crisp, ancient, magical paper.