Raiding the Boston Public Library...

I work within walking distance of the Boston Public Library, which is one of my favorite places in Bostonia. As part of the "Great Save All My Money So That I Can Be Debt Free By The Time I Complete My Master's Degree Plan of 2008", I have been temporarily denying myself the sublime elation of owning new books and checking them out from the BPL.

My way of selecting a book (and just about anything else browsing/shopping related) is grabbing everything that initially catches my eye and then going through a weeding out process at the end (pissing off librarians and retail associates [and perhaps men?] throughout the Metro Boston area).

Today's trip was motivated by returning two books I had out: Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House and Letters Home (a collection of Sylvia Plath's letters to her family from Smith and the early days of her marriage to Ted Hughes before her suicide). I wanted to check out two recently released books and I also wanted to browse other works by Margaret Atwood (from my Top 5 list of authors) for future reading delights. After my browsing process I ended up with the following:

The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap
I had read a chunk of this that was featured as a teaser excerpt in a Christian Liberal magazine I read, and I guess that did its job of getting me to read the book. Too bad for Amy Sullivan, though, because I got it at a library and not a Borders.

Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them
Obviously the title alone was enough to snag me, but I also read a review of this in Wired. Its more of a parenting book than anything else - essentially discussing ways of modifying being a nerd from something that kids abhor to the awesomeness that I (and David Anderegg) know it is. These top two are the books I was specifically after.

Cat's Eye
Margaret Atwood

Moral Disorder
Collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood

Dancing Girls
Collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood

Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield
This is another installment of this awesome series I discovered. People submit their journal entries from their adolescence and the most embarrassing and most hilarious and most familiar entries get collected (by David Nadelberg). Great! As the owner of multiple completely ridiculous diaries, I am definitely a fan. It also includes a small "Where Are They Now"-type section and their commentary as adults. Hilarious.

So, as I began to commence the weeding out, I decided I'd saunter over to the Information Desk to ask how many books someone is allowed to have out simultaneously. Turns out you can check out 75 items at a time! Yes! For some reason, I always figured you were WAY more limited. So, I happily skipped the elimination process and got all of them.
Simple pleasures, I guess, but I am super pumped.