Wednesday Writing Assignment: Thursday Edition

Too Much of a Good Thing

I recently discovered that, although the local library does not have nearly all the titles I would like, it is part of a vast library network that does. I went gangbusters. On Sunday, via the miraculous Internet (thanks, Al Gore!), I requested three books on the Native American tribes in the Acadia region of Maine and a book on shiatsu. It was great---the instant gratification of a bookstore coupled with the free books policy of a library! Who has time to run all over Massachusetts to its various libraries, tracking down books?

But you see, I thought it would take a week or two for them to acquire my greedy stash of nonfiction. My library has to contact the other library, and the other library has to pull the book from its stacks, and I'm sure there's paperwork to be completed or codes to key into the database, and then they have to send it over to my library somehow. Perhaps they mail it, or maybe they send it with the next librarian who's headed to my library for a meeting, and who knows when that could be. Some of the libraries are hours away by car. All this must be done in leftover snatches of time between children's story hour and organizing the Bette Davis film festival.

Apparently Mass libraries are more efficient than I suspected.

I'm already reading my copy of Awakening the Buddha Within (Lama Surya Das) and a library copy of I'm a Stranger Here Myself (Bill Bryson). Yesterday an email notified me that Women of the Dawn (Bunny McBride) had arrived. I picked it up, and began to feel a trifle overwhelmed by my stack of reading with due dates. This morning brought another email: Growing up Native American (Patricia Riley) and The Macrobiotic Way of Zen Shiatsu (David Sergel) are ready for me! All I need is for the last, the largest, book to arrive, and then I might screech like a frightened swine.

Good thing it's a long weekend. I feel that slightly sick desperation I recall from undergraduate days, staring up the mountain of reading. Have you experienced Too Much of Good Thing lately?