In the midst of a 90-plus-minute phonecall with a friend of mine from Baltimore (well... actually from before my time in Baltimore, but that's where he now lives), as we were talking about travel and jobs and families and all sorts of the random things you talk about on 90-minute phonecalls, we somehow started talking about books.
It's weird, you know. I work with books. Eight hours a day, five days a week, I'm pretty much immersed in books. But when I talk about them, I'm mainly talking about the mechanics of them. Things like "Do you prefer end-of-line hyphenation, or do you want those taken out?" or "Maybe you should rename your characters so they're not too cliche..." or "This sentence makes no sense, could you reword it?"
I don't really get to talk about the books as a whole - just the pieces of them. It's basically a "forest for the trees" kind of situation.
So tonight, when we stumbled into a book conversation, it was really nice. He talked about books his book club has been reading. And about books his students have been reading (he's a secondary school librarian). Then I told him about the books we've been reading in my book club, and what I've been working on at work.
I found myself actually taking notes of which books to put on my reading list, which I really can't imagine doing on the phone with more than a few people in my life. In part because I already have a massive stack of books next to my bed, so picking up new books is a dangerous thing to do. Of course, before I can read any of those, I need to finish the proofread that I brought home with me this weekend.
Life would be so much easier if I were independently wealthy.
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