Twenty nine

Want to remain anonymous? She still claims them–these books, which she ordered through a book outlet at an unbelievable price–she jots down a date on each of them: Aug 2022. This month is extremely fruitful; she realizes she has been dropping down this particular month and year many times. Now, what’s on the table. Most of them are hard covers, which not too many people fancy. Yet she’s learning. She begins to admire people who are fearless, daring to stack up books like miniature mountains, heaps and heaps up to their waists. She imagines them looking down at the books like giants, meandering the narrow paths between the absurd land piles. They must have a system, she thinks; like these are the books on wait; these are from friends, and those, are books for research piling up for different writing projects. She looks at The Dolphin Letters, the one-and-a-half inch thick book. She got it at a ridiculous price of $10.19. The original price was $68. Isn’t she happy? That’s what her daughter would have felt – the cheap thrill when she got something at a cost much lower than the tag price. No, this is not what makes her happy. It is the wonderful worlds inside the books, which allow her to expand, to experience, to repel the repetition of everyday life; the monotony marked by trivialities and iterance. For that reason, Averno, and The Wild Iris by Louise Glück; The Lost Soul by Olga Tokarczuk (illustrated by Joanna Concejo); The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979 (Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle); Death in Venice by Thomas Mann; and Chronicles From The Land of The Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka, would mean much much more than paying the bulk price of $55. It stirs up a hell of a storm in her little universe.