(Barenaked Ladies song “If I had a million dollars.”)
In my stack of numbers to check right now, two catch my eye, one for my dad, who reads periodicals, not books, about hammocks, appropriately named The Hammock. The DDC for it is 684.18, Outdoor Furniture. I think we each own our own hammock in my family. When we lived in tropical Honduras, they hung outside on porches or on trees one weekend we “rented” a tiny island. One of my favorite baby pictures of my brother is one of the two of us asleep in a hammock. $17.95
For my brother, who is going to be a park ranger this summer and will probably have a lot of time to read: 1047 pages. Environmental writing since Thoreau. ( I still haven’t read my copy of Walden, but he has. This has passages from fiction (Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath), poetry (Mary Oliver) and a foreword by that erstwhile environmentalist Veep, Al Gore.) It is a book larger than a brick, good to throw at someone if you wanted to possibly injure them (not that I recommend throwing books or injuring others.) The pages are not as thin as Bible pages, but the next level up. Many of my college anthologies of poetry and fiction/drama/essays were made with paper of this thickness. Oh, sad, I wonder if this book would become a college text…well, I suppose I wouldn’t mind taking that class. My mother would jump at a chance, and so would my brother, tree huggers that they are. (And I mean that in the best sense of the phrase.) $40.00, but cheaper if you get it from Amazon.
A book my friend B might go for, she has a sense of the macabre: The Executioner’s Bible: the story of every British hangman of the 20th century. The cover is made to look like it’s torn brown paper and spattered with fresh blood on the back. $17.99.
I suppose I’d only need a fresh Benjamin Franklin to gift these, but since my purse is tight, I think I’ll send emails and save the 42 cents on a stamp. Thank God for the public library.
Ah well, back to work.
not so quiet 