Little Stuff

Yesterday I must have been driving Amy crazy (she had the day off too) so she let me go to the bookstore by myself for a couple hours. I went to Barnes & Noble in Silverdale. I love wandering the stacks.

First of all, I am not recommending Barnes & Noble right now. It's the only real bookstore in Silverdale (if you don't count the hole-in-the-wall Waldenbooks in the mall). And I am pissed at them for a recent online order.

I went to order my and Amy's textbooks for our classes next month. Classes start July 5th and here I was ordering two weeks early. The textbooks listed they would ship in a week or so, so that was fine. $173 worth of books. So I submitted it.

After I placed the online order, I was getting messages saying that they wouldn't ship until June 23rd! My class is over by June 30th. Amy can't wait three weeks for her books. So I tried cancelling the order.

Oh my god, you wouldn't believe what this did. I was able to cancel one of the three online but two could not be cancelled. I called the 800# for Barnes & Noble and they told me they could only put in a request to cancel the order, because apparently they order the textbooks through some textbook warehouse. Some system was down ( of course!), and they couldn't put in the request either. So I have been calling everyday to make sure it gets done. I have gotten a bunch of doubletalk actually. I'm giving it one more day and then tomorrow I am talking to this "supervisor" they keep referring to. (Maybe this is why I never really get anywhere in life because I am too nice to people on the phone when I should rant and rave to get my way, but I digress to another time...)

So I went to the bookstore to browse. I ended up picking up three things to read this week. I was looking for a book, you know what I mean? I was looking to read something that would move me again like literature used to. I wanted a book like the first time I read The Catcher in the Rye (I just read it again for my class and reading it for the twelfth time, no matter how good it reads, just isn't the same emotional impact). I wanted something like the first time I read 1984, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Foundation, The Chocolate War, Dune, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Jurassic Park (and other Crichton books), and many other choices. Not an easy task.

So I got out of the science fiction-fantasy section. That section hasn't moved me for quite some time. I thought of picking up a Star Trek to read but the section was massive. And every book looked to be part of a twelve-book series, and I didn't want that. So I wandered.

I found the following:
Cold by John Smolens
The Stranger by Albert Camus
and America: The Book by Jon Stewart of The Daily Show (I thought I should have something fun too!)

I'm going to try to finish them this week (before class starts on July 5th) and write reviews. To be continued...