It makes me sound like a fool to say it breaks my heart a little every time it happens…people don’t really realize that in a great many ways my books are like my children. I know them, I care for them, and when they are hurt, I hurt in some little way.
So when I find one, especially one that started the last cruise brand new, lying forlornly with its dust jacket roughly torn away and its inner identifying page torn out so that it may be more easily stolen (and this is why people do this, and I can’t help but wonder why if they want the book that desperately they don’t simply buy it, or download it – why must they mutilate?) …when I find a book like that, I pick it up, and run my fingers down its naked spine, and shake my head that the cruelty of the world. Such books need to be removed from the collection immediately, we can’t have anything on the shelves that isn’t in at least mostly presentable condition…they’re meant to go to the crew library, or to the incinerator.
On my watch no book ever goes to the incinerator.
So it seems that I have now acquired a poor injured copy of Pillars of the Earth…which I feel now compelled to read…even though I’m in the middle of the second book of the Hunger Games (though I finished the first one in a day, those aren’t exactly hard reads) and still trying to get started on Dance of Dragons…
Too many books…not enough reading time.