Cleaning up the library list

I have found myself fighting a feeling of mild depression lately and wondering what's causing it. The weather has cooled down. We've had some rain to relieve the dryness. The gardens are looking lovely. The crops are coming in. We have a Labor Day week-end trip planned to relieve the monotony. Just what is my problem? Finally I think I've figured it out. It has to do with my current read. I usually read a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening. If I take a break in the afternoon, I might read a little then too. There are the newspapers and the magazines and the stuff that comes in the mail. But the main things to be read are the books from the library list. Right now the list has 121 titles on it with 18 crossed out. When 40 to 50 have been crossed out and it gets looking frayed and messy, I'll sit down and copy the whole thing over, leaving off the crossed off titles which have been read. The books at the top of the list are four to five years old. This works out good for me because librarys at points south of here are reluctant to send their brand new books up into the hinterland. Usually they'll send their five year old books right away instead of making me wait for months. A good book is still good five years later. If I find that no library in Minnesota has the five year old book I want, Amazon.com will sell it to me, sometimes for only a penny [plus shipping and handling, of course]. Most of the books on my list have been reviewed in the Sunday paper. I keep a cardboard box of the clipped out reviews in my workroom. If I'm getting bad vibes from a title I can go to the box and find and re-read the review and decide whether to order it. But for some psychological reason it just kills me to take a title off the list unread. The book I'm reading now has been number one on the list it seems like forever. A year ago the Ford dealer in Thief River Falls advertised a fall special. You could get your oil changed, all of your belts, filters and fluids checked and your tires rotated for forty bucks. That seemed like a good deal to me. A downside would be the 180 mile round trip, but I could stop at the Thief River Falls Library to make it more worthwhile. It was t here, on that day, that I first held the book that I'm currently reading in my hands. I could have checked it out then, but I didn't and I've been avoiding it ever since. Why? Because it's 780 pages long. It's an effort just to hold it. I kept reading over the review and trying to make myself cross it off the list. But I had to face facts. It sounded like a worthwhile book. A couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and requested it. Thief River Falls sent it post haste. I couldn't believe the speed. I ordered it on a Sunday night and the Warroad Library called Tuesday noon and asked me to come pick it up. The Minnesota Northwest Regional Library System has been eagerly waiting for someone to read that book. And I'm doing it. And I'm depressed. It is The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann. It is well-written. It is divided into 36 "books". Each begins with a quote, many from the Bible. The "books" are divided into little vignettes. There are 593 of them in all. It was a skillful thing todo with such a long book, I think. Like when I divide my gardens into little squares. I can weed one square at a time, feel like I've accomplished something, and the job doesn't seem so over-whelming. I'm not depressed because the book is so long. I'm depressed because I'm dwelling vicariously in the Tenderloin and Mission districts of San Francisco. The royal family is a family of whores. The young lady who cuts my hair has been trying to convince me that I shouldn't wash my hair every day. I do sometimes think about all the gallons of water I use and feel guilty about it. I'm trying to wash my hair and take a bath only every other day. I just wash up a little on the off day. Can you imagine having sex off and on all day and never taking a bath? William Vollmann keeps telling me over and over how these women smell and about all the stains on their clothes. I'm reading about how bad it hurts when they need their drugs, the abcesses on their legs, their abortions, the fights they get into, etc. etc. I'm on page 323 and living in a different world. I'm going to finish. Amazon.com has sent me three other books from the top of the library list and those books are waiting for me. I'm hoping that when I cross number one off the list my mood will lift.