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Honey... I'm sleeping with my books
Jun. 19th, 2011 05:03 pmI have this bad habit of reading in bed. Novels, shorts, magazines - anything that has words, really. I read until the words no longer make sense, then tuck whatever I'm reading next to my pillow so I have something pleasant to greet me in the mornings. I also have this other bad habit of not returning books to the shelf right away. This means that after a few days, the stack next to my pillow grows so unwieldy that it begins to interfere with my sleep, like a knobbly literary tumor.
Today I decided it was time to restore my books to their rightful places. (Their comrades on the shelves wanted it too - how they would topple over each other in a mad attempt to reach the bed!) Halfway through, I noticed that some of my older titles were missing. They weren't on the shelf, or on the dinner table, or in my bags, or on the ironing board. They couldn't be lost in the subway since I never read on public transit, and nobody'd borrowed anything in a long time, so they *had* to be here somewhere!
Let's check the more uncommon places... in the shower... behind the toaster... under the bed...
Oh, there's a shape! A rectangular shape! MANY rectangular shapes! Let's get the flashlight to confirm... and yes! Books!
Doesn't take much guessing: I'd apparently been knocking books off for *months* in my sleep, and the only reason it hadn't been so obvious was that I'd "lose" very few of them - one or two - per stack, and I'd have finished them long ago by then. In the end, three books and one magazine were "lost" and rescued. Here are the titles, for the curious:
- "Norse Myths", by Kevin Crossley-Holland
- "Reading in the Brain", by Stanislas Dehaene
- "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Other Pieces", by James Thurber
- Scientific American Mind, March/April 2011
Monster under my bed must be pretty well read by now. Don't think I don't know you were *really* the one stealing my books, bub. ;)
(P.S. If this were an attention test... I just flunked it pretty magnificently. ;)
Today I decided it was time to restore my books to their rightful places. (Their comrades on the shelves wanted it too - how they would topple over each other in a mad attempt to reach the bed!) Halfway through, I noticed that some of my older titles were missing. They weren't on the shelf, or on the dinner table, or in my bags, or on the ironing board. They couldn't be lost in the subway since I never read on public transit, and nobody'd borrowed anything in a long time, so they *had* to be here somewhere!
Let's check the more uncommon places... in the shower... behind the toaster... under the bed...
Oh, there's a shape! A rectangular shape! MANY rectangular shapes! Let's get the flashlight to confirm... and yes! Books!
Doesn't take much guessing: I'd apparently been knocking books off for *months* in my sleep, and the only reason it hadn't been so obvious was that I'd "lose" very few of them - one or two - per stack, and I'd have finished them long ago by then. In the end, three books and one magazine were "lost" and rescued. Here are the titles, for the curious:
- "Norse Myths", by Kevin Crossley-Holland
- "Reading in the Brain", by Stanislas Dehaene
- "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Other Pieces", by James Thurber
- Scientific American Mind, March/April 2011
Monster under my bed must be pretty well read by now. Don't think I don't know you were *really* the one stealing my books, bub. ;)
(P.S. If this were an attention test... I just flunked it pretty magnificently. ;)
