We were at McKay’s in Gainesville, Virginia, enjoying the atmosphere among the stacks of secondhand books with a swirl of all sorts of people devouring a common passion. Ava and d headed toward the kid’s section where they hit a motherlode of ‘Junie B. Jones’ which has totally enamored our daughter. Me, being in an essay and memoir frame of mind, I bought Roger Ebert’s Life Itself, E.L. Doctorow’s Creationists, Sloane Crosley’s How Did You Get This Number, and Facing Unpleasant Facts by George Orwell. I read so many fictional books as a freelancer that I find myself more and more in the non-fiction section for entertainment.
Small observation: it used to be when someone passed in front of you in an aisle there would be a polite, “Excuse me.” That was the norm … or at least it’s how I seem to remember it. Look, I’m not someone who longs for the good old days. I know people are people and remain largely unchanged, but I don’t believe I’m mistaken that common courtesies in libraries and bookstores were the standard and only occasionally would someone fail to live up to it. Agree? Disagree?