There's GOLD In Dem Dere Books!

My checkout receipt from the library 

Since our local district library joined a larger consortium, users like me have had a whole new world of quick, speedy access open up. Wow! Sometimes I feel I have a book in my hands (from another library system, mind you) before I finish requesting it. Well, maybe not quite that fast, but often the turnaround time is so short that I speculate the consortium libraries must have built giant pneumatic tubes connecting one to the other, or have installed an underground track on which carts full of books whiz from one location to the next. It's been great.

Another change I recently noticed is that when I check out books and print out my receipt listing the titles and when the books are due, there is a little note at the bottom telling me how much I saved on this transaction by checking out rather than buying the books, and how much I have saved "this  past year," which I suspect means "year to date since joining the consortium."

When I checked out five books this past Saturday, I saved $112.89. My overall savings (since whenever it started tracking this)? $1438.89!

$1400.00 plus? That's not chump change. For someone who tries hard to keep the household and personal expenditures lean, this little note just cracks me up every single time.

So what have I read since I last posted? These fine beauties:
99. My Name Is Asher Lev by the late, great Chaim Potok (oh, what I could say about rereading this novel, ranging from the high school English teacher who put it in my hands thinking my artistic soul was tortured to how this introduced me to the works of Potok to how influential Potok's writing was in my studying and eventually converting to Judaism)
100. Go Home! edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (a superb collection of poems, essays, and stories from the modern Asian diaspora)
101. The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat (this novel threw me off with its young woman narrator realizing in the end that she doesn't even mean enough to the sinister commune dwellers she flees to warrant their tracking her down)
102. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (this was a reread of a book I read over 30 years ago; I was floored upon rereading it to discover Dillard was only 27 when she wrote it—back then I would have guessed she was in her 50s or older)
103. Black Lotus by Sil Lai Abrams (a memoir by a biracial author who didn't know she was biracial until she was 13 years old, this book explores questions of race, family, and the power of lies and truths)
104. Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalie Sylvester (family, love, death, borders, home, forgiveness, and belonging, all wrapped up in a beautifully written novel)
105. Outline by Rachel Cusk (this is the first novel in a trilogy told by a woman, a mother who has left her marriage and is starting to navigate a new life; Cusk, a British author, has a very spare writing style)
106. The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail (this book, translated from Arabic by the author and Max Weiss, is a harrowing account of women (and children) escaping ISIS; this book once again hammered home—as has happened so often this year—my woeful ignorance and my extreme privilege as a white woman living in America)
107. The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles by Gary Krist (William Mulholland and water, D.W. Griffith and the nascent movie industry, and Aimee Semple McPherson and her role in making the evangelical movement and the mega-church a fixture in America are all threaded through this look at how Los Angeles went from a town that never should have existed to a major U.S. city in the first 30 years of the twentieth century)
108. Transit by Rachel Cusk [see also book #105] (I'm still not sure where, if anywhere, Cusk is going with this trilogy, other than to have the main character provide a very low key narration to her life; at times, reading it, I imagine her speaking in the hushed tones of a sports commentator at a major gold tournament)

With five months behind me, I will finish the year at around 260 books if I keep the same pace. Looking at how far I've made it through the five I brought home on Saturday, I don't think that should be a problem.