I attempt to limit visits to the bookstore. Oh, don’t get me wrong – I love bookstores. I get positively giddy about them, wandering around in a heady euphoria that garners me strange looks from the rest of the clientele. Meh. Pseudobibliophiles. Sometimes, it’s enough just to touch the books, savor their heft and thickness, delve gingerly into the first few pages. Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators. A Benjamin Franklin Education. A first-hand account of late-WWII Berlin under Russian occupation. Yet another scientist claims that evolution and God, science and religion, naturalism and theism can be friends. Treatises on chaos theory and quarks and that elusive Higgs Boson. A small square cookbook in pale green with a perfect bowl of soup, fragrant and steamy, on the cover. Leather-bound copies of Shakespeare. A novel about a medieval illuminator who dares to illustrate John Wycliffe’s English Bible. Mmmm. I could live in a bookstore, living off free coffee and trash-can-diving treasures, sleeping . . . only when necessary.

But, I digress. I attempt to limit visits to the bookstore because of the potential for irreparable damage to my income. Bargain books, especially, are my downfall. Any purchase can be justified if it’s 40% off. Libraries, on the other hand, are relatively guilt-free. I can happily pile book upon book until the stack reaches from my fingertips to my chin, shrug off the raised eyebrows of librarians, gleefully resist the offer of a bag, return the books in three days, and start over again, my last two dimes still jingling in my pocket – the sole survivors of a Powell’s shopping spree. Except for library book sales – they get me in trouble, too.

Re: my post on July 25th . . . I crave knowledge as much as any Eve out there, hence my bookstore obsession, and it still irks me to have Christians painted as ignorant by the world, even though I know, I know that their opinion doesn’t matter. And simply because I advocate a certain approach to learning and intellectualism, or anything else for that matter, doesn’t mean I’ve got it all figured out, or even that I follow my own advice most of the time. My posts are more often prayers and sermons directed at myself than anything else.