It's a Jason isn't it? He seems happy on the outside. He has a good job, people think he's lucky having a probably pretty wife and the dinner parties are great in a home that's so neutral no-one can dislike the decor.
But he's thinking of ending it. It's just that every time he is about to have enough free time to drown himself or something he gets a text from Lauren that needs answering immediately.
She wouldn't like the mess anyway, he ponders, it wouldn't be very neutral.
Did you know you can buy books with blank pages? You can even choose the severity of the discoloration and degree of mottling of the pages. Utter psychopaths.
Cohen was shocked. 'Bonfires of books?' 'Yes. Horrible, isn't it?' 'Right,' said Cohen. He thought it was appalling. Someone who spent his life living rough under the sky knew the value of a good thick book, which ought to outlast at least a season of cooking fires if you were careful how you tore the pages out. Many a life had been saved on a snowy night by a handful of sodden kindling and a really dry book. If you felt like a smoke and couldn't find a pipe, a book was your man every time.
Cohen realised people wrote things in books. It had always seemed to him to be a frivolous waste of paper.
I had heard books having titles on their spine is relatively recent. Partially due to books being stored like they are here, to prevent the pages from rotting. Allegedly titles started to be printed on spines with Alice in Wonderland, at least for mass-produced books.
I'm having trouble coming up with a source, Wikipedia mentions early books not having titles on the spine, but doesn't mention storage or when this practice changed. Or a source. That's as far as I was able to track any of this down.
All this to say, there might be prior precedent for this. Which for me moves her behavior (even if that's not her stated reason) towards eccentric, rather than book-hating.
That definitely isn't true. My father collected antiquarian books for a while and there are plenty of books from the 18th century that have titles on their spines.
the side with the title on it is facing the wall, so that they all look roughly the same color when viewed from the front. And now you can't tell which book is which.
What he doesn't know is the Lauren put it in the recycling 5 weeks ago. His ghost will forever wander the house turning a book around, sighing and moving on to the next one. Lauren is quietly pleased about it as J is now very neutral, the all that ground glass in his Buddha bowls was worth the effort.
My daughter does this, has done since she was a little girl. Once, I asked her why - she just shrugged and said she preferred it that way, no specific reason.
Fair enough, I thought. Her books, her shelves, no one was getting harmed by it - and I moved on.
Why is everyone getting so butt hurt in this thread about it?
I love reading. I read a lot. And I rarely open a paper book. So perhaps Lauren also has an e-reader, and keeps the books there because she inherited them. Or maybe she likes the smell of old books as it reminds her of her grandparents house where she used to spend her summers. Or it may be that she likes the feel of moving her fingers through all those pages. It brings back old memories of her librarian mother who passed away when she was just a child. Or...
The point being, why the hate? So here's a different take. Perhaps Lauren has a good reason to have the books like that.