I can't believe it. I achieved something I didn't think I'd live to see. Remember, I thought I'd be dead by now. This means I have a chance. I actually have a chance!
When I finished reading The Black Star Passes by John W. Campbell, I finished the second (of three) notebook of my reading list. The third is only half full, and since I haven't been able to afford many new books lately, I'm not adding much to it.
I might actually finish my reading list before I die. Holy shit, that's huge!
When I was a kid I put together a list of all the books I owned. That was the first page and a half of the list. I was able to add to my personal collection thanks to several factors. The Hillside Public Library usually had a good rack of used paperbacks you could get for fifty cents each. Then there was the Book Exchange in Berkley, my favorite used bookstore of all time. You could get used hardcovers there for a couple of bucks each, and paperbacks were usually a quarter. And then there was the single biggest contributor to my collection: the annual Elmhurst Public Library sales. They'd give you a paper grocery bag, and you could fill it to the brim with as many books as you possibly could, and you'd pay five bucks for the bag. Every year I'd go home with five or six bags.
When I got my first job (at the Elmhurst Public Library, by the way), I only had two expenses: my student loans and books, except now I could afford to get books at actual stores like Borders. And when I got my first big boy office job? Think of all the books I got in those days before I had real life expenses like rent and groceries, etc. By then I realized I'd never live to finish my list, and I didn't even have two full notebooks yet.
But now I have a new problem. I'm having sight issues. I'm not going blind, per se, but I have huge floaters in both eyes, and they're so big it's next to impossible to blink them out of the way. I'm starting to have difficulty in reading because of them. The only cure for floaters is to have a procedure done where, when they're finished, you have to lie face down in bed for two weeks with your eyes covered up. I can't afford to do that, money- and time-wise. If I do that, I will lose my home.
So now it's just not a matter of living long enough to finish that last notebook. I also have to read it all before I go blind. This victory, though, has given me hope. I might actually succeed at doing this. And I've thought about what I would do if I ever finished the list. For the first time since I was a kid, I'd just go to the library and pick a book off the shelf. Or a bookstore, if we still have those in the future. It was always a pipe dream, but now that I have a chance?
Wish me luck.
In case you were wondering, the first book on my list was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. The copy I had back then was an old hardcover from the 1930's that I picked up from my stepfather (and it had Twain's real name on it for some reason), but now I have a replica of the first edition, and if you didn't know it, nearly all of Twain's books originally came with woodcut illustrations. For some reason, scholarly versions of the text leave those pictures out. They're pretty amazing. You should read the books as the author intended, with those pictures.
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