And so concludes my brief investigation of the paranormal

I've returned all the paranormal books. You can only read so many before you realize they all say the same thing about being human and little about anything real. The most interesting book I happened to grab was a book of photos by a woman who found "ghosts" in the shadows of "haunted houses." The way she captured light and color in some of the spaces emphasized the formerly living occupants of the space, so while there was nobody in the picture, you could almost see someone in the picture. (I mean, she made it easy to imagine someone in the picture if you were looking for someone-- and this was what these books say about being human).  I like that sort of thing. (Though there've been many times I thought I'd found Waldo, but it turned out to be a barber pole...)

I traded the books in for 8 books on vegetable gardening, 2 DVDs of short films, a book about Mary Shelley (who is my favorite person/writer), The Tiger's Wife, and Lucky Jim.  After reading Hardy's Jude the Obscure last summer (fall? Was that just this spring?), I've been desperate to find a funny book that might pop up on a GRE English Subject Test. Alas! I've found one. So far, the best line comes after Dixon kicks a stone and it hits an English professor: "At the moment of impact he'd turned and began to walk down the drive, but knew well enough that he was the only visible entity capable of stone propulsion." Such good stuff! The book also cashes in on a significant number of GRE vocab words for which I recently made flashcards, so I feel like I'm killing 2 birds with one stone as it were.

Today, I could talk about books until dark. But, off to work for me, where I will think about reading books and then come home to read them. Or read them on my lunch break...