My new bookstore rule that future me does thank past me for but bookstore me hates

It's hard not to buy all the books, is all I'm sayin'.

You perhaps noticed that I did not buy a whole lot of books last month. (It was painful.)

And I told you in the February round-up that I had a new rule curtailing my $$. Here’s the rule: if I’m not dying to go home and open it right that minute, if it doesn’t trump everything else on ye olde #TBR, it has to stay there until it does.

It’s agony, because it pretty much means I can only buy one book on any given trip. Maybe two. But what if I’m in one of those amazing bookstores where it’s as if the tables were made for me? Like the Barnes and Noble on Union Square, or Gibson’s in Concord? I love my local, I truly do. But I am not their primary target customer, and it’s very small, so I’m unlikely to just run across something I haven’t heard of, or only tangentially, that I’m also dying to read.

So at a recent Gibson’s visit, I replaced purchasing additional books (I bought The Queens of Crime and The Story Collector) with taking their pictures.

Here’s why I was there: Sarina Bowen interviewing Christine Murphy, author of Notes on Surviving the Fire.

It was so so hard to leave these two behind. So hard that, in fact, I’d put solid $$ on my having bought at least one by the time you read this.

It is a book about writing! I’d already heard about it and wanted it! But no, it stayed right there. I bet it misses me.

This has been described as Sex and the City… but in Gaza. I read a few pages. It was quite promising. I hope to get there, we’ll see—if you’ve read it, I want to know!

I’m off to Spain for a ski vacation with my Kindle (which may or may not contain one or more of the above books; I have not properly loaded it yet) and Monica Dickens’ Mariana in my bag. (Wrote about that one here.)

Austen fans, a (not modern) book for you!!

It’s Kindle for me because I WILL travel light this time (at least until I wander into a bookstore…). If I’m not traveling, though, the Kindle is not my favorite format. I start books in there and then I forget them. How about you?