It’s like the literature gods have my number and are determined to stuff my brain with wonder until it explodes. So many recent books written Just For Me.

Today at the Coop (supposedly looking for a math workbook, and while I was at it the Perec that may or may not be out of print, and, and, and…) I grabbed Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. The forward was my undoing:

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. No one stepping for the first time into a room full of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror–at the clutter or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn’t know, the surveillance–and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, the natives found friendly.

I’m beside myself.