People whose fault it is

So I just bought ninety books over the past few days, right? Of which about forty-two are books that I’ve never read before, but presumably I want to read them because I bought them. They are sitting in my living room in an appealing stack, waiting to be put on a shelf that has not yet been moved into my apartment because it is large and heavy and I’m not strong and I don’t have a truck or a dolly. And I decided very reasonably that what I would do is, I would read all the books I currently have checked out of the library, and when I had finished them, I would return them all, and when I had returned them all, I would start reading my nice new books. I figured this would take a little while because some of the books I have out of the library are huge and long, like the biography of Edward Murrow (which is awesome by the way), but that is not a big deal because my library book bazaar books belong to me and I do not have a deadline for reading them.

Today I returned three of the books to the library. I had read one of them a few days ago so it was well time to get rid of it, and I read the other two over the weekend. I felt like this was excellent progress on my part, bringing my total number of checked-out library books down from fourteen to eleven, a major step in achieving my goal of returning all of my books, a total library book reduction of just over twenty percent. And do you know what I did then? I went and checked out THREE MORE BOOKS. It was totally counterproductive, and here’s who I blame it on:

1. Michael Sera for being funny in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and making me want to read the book and see how it compares.
2. Kirkus Reviews for calling Thursday’s Children “goopy treacle” – you can shut your face, okay? – and comparing it unfavorably with some other book about dancing, rendering it necessary for me to check the other book about dancing out of the library to check that it isn’t better than Thursday’s Children, which I seriously doubt that it is. And anyway Thursday’s Children is not goopy treacle and it does have substance. And charm. So there.
3. Also: the author of the other book about dancing, for being from Baton Rouge and writing about a book about a Louisiana girl. Way to make your book irresistible to me.
4. My grandmother for taking me to Barnes & Noble one time and letting me loose to wander around, notice Merlin Holland’s excellent The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, and fall into a mad and relentless obsession with Oscar Wilde, and subsequently into lesser but related obsessions with gender issues, sexual ethics, and the Victorians.
5. Also: my therapist parents for talking about mental health all the time so that now I am obsessed with that too.
6. Also: book blogs for writing appealing reviews that deal with Victorian-era women who are unhappy in their marriages and go see neurologists to help them deal with their mental issues.

THANKS A LOT, Y’ALL.

(No, but really: thanks a lot. I am looking forward to reading these books. Especially the book about dancing because I am interested to see how it compares – not because I am determined to reject it in comparison with Thursday’s Children although I am certain that it won’t be as good – just because I like it when somebody compares two books and then I read them both and decide what I think. Like that time someone said Geek Love was a way better circus book than Water for Elephants and I read them both and decided I should just stick to Circus Shoes and never again venture out into the world of circus books.)