7/7/2025

 Monday, July 7, 2025

D+241/169/1292

In bed at 9, awake around 5:15 and up at 5:40.  58°, high of 71°, sunny.    

I like books.  I can no longer read them, but I like them.  I used to enjoy reading them, and even if I didn't care to read a particular book, I appreciated that it was a book.  I appreciated that an author went to the considerable trouble to write it and that someone thought enough of it to publish and distribute it.  I like new books and I like used books.  I have mixed feelings about marking up books - underlining, highlighting, marginalia, etc, but I even like used books that a prior owner has marked up.  A book that has been marked up is a book the reader thought about as she read it, a book she probably intended to keep and not to resell.  It is a book the reader thought she would or might return to with her markups as guideposts to passages of some significance.   I even like it when a prior owner has inscribed her name on the book, and sometimes the year of acquisition.  It suggests the importance of ownership: "This is MY book."  I generally prefer hardbound books to paperbacks, which seem too disposable.  I especially prefer leatherbound books and books in slipcases.  Their bindings and protective cases proclaim, "This is an important book."  Leatherbound books also have heft, which I appreciate - not too much heft, like my leatherbound War and Peace, but enough to signify permanence and importance.  I am also a sucker for collections of books, even ones that were traditional inducements to join the Book-of-the-Month Club.  like Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization.  I managed to hold off on acquiring that magnum opus but did acquire from other sources the works of Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Elie Wiesel, and Saul Bellow.

I have a good number of leatherbound and slipcased books that I have acquired over many decades.  Many of them I have read; many I have not read.  Some I have gone into more than once, mostly collections of poetry, but also The Great Gatsby, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Crime and Punishment, and even The Iliad ("rosey-fingered dawn"). 

I think about books this morning because I opened my laptop to a page on Ebay with THE COLLECTED TALES OF A. E. COPPARD, offered for $19.95 plus $4.95 shipping.    

I sometiimes wonder what will become of my books (paintings journal, memoir)  once I am dead, or worse. 

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I stopped writing this, intending to return to it, when I left the house the VA Urology Clinic and Mental Health Clinic ("subdued mood")  .  I'm told I need surgery on my penis.  If I wasn't depressed when I left, I am now.