Day 190

Last week I finally went to the library, got a library card, and checked out a book.

I used to loved going to the library.  When I was little little and living in eastern NC we would walk to the library and go downstairs to story time.  Then when we had moved to the Piedmont, we would drive to the library and I remember that smell.  You know what I'm talking about.  That distinctive old, inky, papery smell of the library.  It's like going into an antique bookstore and just taking a deep breath.  It's exactly the same at the libraries I remember going to when I was growing up.  Well, that is until we started going to the really nice new one in downtown.  The newness just killed that smell.

This library is like the one in downtown.  It's new and really nice and it doesn't have that wonderful library smell.  But it does have lots of books, DVDs, magazines, and books on CD that I haven't even heard of.

I didn't really know what book I wanted to read and wasn't really having any luck just browsing through and picking books up and reading the blurb, so I went upstairs, jumped on a computer, and hopped on Oprah's website to find a book to read.  After 20 minutes of searching, I found a book, wrote down the info, found it and checked it out.

"You Know When the Men Are Gone" by Siobhan Fallon.  She's an Army wife currently living in the Middle East, where her husband is stationed, with a past living on Texas's Fort Hood.  And that's what this is about.  The lives of people at Fort Hood and then men that leave to serve their country overseas, and the men that have to stay.

I'm a little over halfway through and it's a really good, quick read.  Today I was sitting on the living room floor reading while John was watching TV.  I put down my book for a few seconds and honestly had no idea he was watching Pawn Stars.  When it came back from commercial, I looked at him and said, "Weren't we watching something about war?"  He responded, "Nooo.  That's your book."  I was so into it and was picturing it so vividly that I thought it was a TV show.  Crazy.