B&N Used To Sell Books

Now that the semester is finally over, T and I are able to synchronize our schedules and actually meet up. We met at B&N first to look at books. Book-looking is fun. It gives me ideas about what not to write. It proves that you should judge a book by its cover.

B&N has changed. The entire center of the first floor is devoted to The Nook. What happened to all the pretty book displays? They are still standing on the sides, but right in the middle is a void. No books. Just Nooks. I know the Nook is a book--many books in fact--but I like seeing lots of books in a bookstore. It makes me feel all warm and gushy. This made me feel like I was in the wrong store.

When T and I went up to the second floor, they had toys. Stuffed animals. Stickers. Shrinky-dinks. These are not books either.

Once I got over the changes--change is bad!--we went through the bargain bins. T saved a small white stuffed bunny from getting grimy in the bin by moving it to where all the other stuffed animals are. Then we went through the books. Rows and rows of books.

B&N wants you to read a book a day this summer. How do I know this? Every table they set up had a sign that said: Summer Reading. There were a whole lotta summer reading books--from Lolita to The Lord of the Flies from The Great Gatsby to Night, all kinds of books. I actually wanted to read Lolita this summer but the local library had every Nabokov book on the shelf except for that one. Maybe it will be back before the summer ends.

Off we went to get coffee. There, we realized that the end of the world was near. The rain was coming and going outside. A bus kept passing by the window with the announcement that the world was ending. It listed a radio station to listen to. We pondered this for a while. The rain didn't seem like an omen. It seemed like an annoyance, the cause of a bad hair day. When we parted ways, I tuned into the station in my car. They didn't say anything about the world ending. They talked about hepatitis. Unless the end is coming in the form of this disease, I think we're pretty much safe for now.