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.