Deep Discounts

Here, in honor of my final day of work having commenced, presented in roughly chronological order: the list of books I bought while working at Borders, using my employee discount:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz*; Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom*; Volpone, the Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson; The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee; The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon; The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton; The Marx-Engels Reader; The Road by Cormac McCarthy*; How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard; Grendel by John Gardner*; The Art of Fiction by John Gardner*; Author, Author by David Lodge; His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman*; The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger*; Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse*; Like You'd Understand Anyway by Jim Shepard; The Performing Self by Richard Poirier; Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov; The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse*; Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman; Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris*; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrakesaran; Through the Children's Gate by Adam Gopnik; Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnameable by Samuel Beckett; Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler; The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom; Must Me Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell; The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell; The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges; Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis; and Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.

Asterisks denote books that I have actually finished. As you can see, my readerly eyes were obviously way bigger than my readerly tummy. Especially w/r/t the ol' Literary Criticism section though, in fairness, some of those were meant to augment my no-underlining summer reading. Gotta make up that underlining somewhere. Also, I am glad that my last three purchases as an employee were about baseball, alcohol, and things people made up, which I consider my three ruling passions.

Here, also, are the books that I read while on breaks/during down time, while at good old store 0196:
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus*; I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley*$; God is Dead by Ron Currie Jr*; After Theory by Terry Eagleton*; All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen*; and Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama*.

Asterisks again denote books I have finished, for continuity's sake, and dollar signs denote authors whom I have Facebook friended.

And so of course I made these lists while I was bored at work, and waved them at my coworkers as a sort of conspicuous, tasteful consumption. But of course the more I thought about it, the more the list seemed to mean to me: there it was, laid out, what I wanted to do for nine months. Around January, I wanted to be a guy who knew about Walt Whitman and the Green Zone. I still know nothing about them, but I know more about me and what I'm doing, because of those books I picked up. Do any other commodities work like that? Can you still call something that works like this a commodity? I think that's one reason I am happy to be leaving my current position --I will get away from the commodification of books -- because, man, I love books. Them, and baseball, drinks, and imaginary beings.

Postscript -- glad to be leaving my current position as I am, I would be remiss, at any such juncture, not to quote the Doctor: "of a place which has been frequently visited, tho' without pleasure, the last look is taken with heaviness of heart". That sounds about right. Fleeting heaviness, though, I hope.