Addicts Beware

I’m a book addict. I love the smell of dust or the scent of ink, the feel of the soft leather or the dry paper pages, I love the titles and the pithy sayings and the heartfelt stories—the life given to these objects. This is all to say that if you leave me in a Borders store for more than two seconds alone, you’ll have to leave without me; I’ll be buried in the Literature section, gasping in awe at editions of books and reading chapters at random. I had enough time alone there yesterday that I actually stumbled upon three lovely shelves of poetry and plays. I know, it’s kind of odd that there were only three small shelves, but I found gold anyway: two compendiums of Langston Hughes’ poetry. Yes. I was thrilled. Beyond that, I found a bunch of the titles I have on my list that must be finished before graduation:
The Canterbury Tales

King Lear

Gulliver's Travels

War and Peace

Anna Karenina

The Iliad

Don Quixote

Tom Jones

Les Miserables

Civil Disobedience (If I can get through it without bashing my head into a wall one too many times. I’ll quote Thoreau, but I really don’t like to sit down and read his work. Walden had me deeply annoyed for days.)

The Communist Manifesto

Middlemarch (A leap, no?)

Turn of the Screw

The Cherry Orchard

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Waiting for Godot

The Grapes of Wrath

The Glass Menagerie

The Handmaid's Tale

Invisible Man (Not to be confused with "The Invisible Man")

Sophie's World

Catch-22

Beloved

**The Color Purple**

Slaughterhouse Five

Atlas Shrugged

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Atlas Shrugged

The Poisonwood Bible

**Passage to India **

Vanity Fair *

This list was started about a month ago, and since then I’ve only completed…two. Yeah…well, * = started, and ** = Completed. I’ll update as I go! The Russian lit is going to be a hardship for me, but I’m really looking forward to many of these titles.

Oh yes, the moral? Don't let yourself wander a book store unless you have a purpose, or you'll end up like me--lost for an hour without any realization that you look crazy to people walking past as you mouth the words to the poem you're reading.