Thank you, everyone, for all your lovely comments on the romper! I am back to fording through a sea of UFOs, but I am also reading.

This return to my vow to not have another year with hardly any books in it was rather unexpected. Amidst the kerfuffle of starting a new job, I was shown our leisure fiction section. Now I am a picky reader, and all of the things that make most books wildly popular are the exact things that turn me off.

But this is a college library, and colleges are like universities, and my good friend and erstwhile university page had shared with me the best-kept secret of university libraries: the P‘s

Unless you were an English major, you are probably thinking that all the book fumes have done me permanent damage. Please don’t get out the straitjacket until I’m done. Colleges & universities arrange their books according to the library of Congress classification system, which gives each Field of Knowledge a letter. In the happy world of the early Library of Congress, there were fewer than 26 bodies of knowledge, and content produced by England and her erstwhile colony, the U.S., got priority, but this is not the place for my Outdated and Ethnocentric Library Institutions rant.

P was the letter assigned to literature, and for all you English majors, that is where you will go to find Great Works of Literature. It’s now where I go for what I call Leisure fiction. There’s Shakespeare, and Dickens, and Doyle, and all other lovely books that make me salivate (I know. For someone who has rants about ethnocentrism, I do like books by a lot of long-dead white guys.)

I tried Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, which was only meh, and now I am on to Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which is to die for. And when I’m done with Rebecca, I can read another book, and another, and another.

Borges was right: Paradise is a kind of library.