Annual Celebration of the Vicarious Life

Real life has been so full this winter that I almost passed through the Season of Vicarious living without - living vicariously.  Riding the T every morning I've glared jealousy at the other commuters tucked into fluffy little paperbacks. Life may be good, but still, there is something about late winter that makes me want to live someone else's life for a little while. I guess that impulse is what drives some to reality tv, but for me it's what drives me to the Library.

And so it was during the gray snowy day that was last Wednesday I finally picked up some good winter-reading books and started making up for lost time. First off was Jack Keroucs' Satori in Paris, a 'vacation' as driven and chaotic as the best of them. On the historical side there was Remaking Boston: An Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings (Pittsburgh Hist Urban Environ). A great collection of articles on the interaction of man, technology and geography. Did you know Boston used to have hills? and was practically an island? But the hills were leveled, the bays filled and Boston has grown.

Now I'm reading The Bad Book Affair: A Mobile Library Mystery (Mobile Library Mysteries), the semi-mystery about a mobile librarian in Northern Ireland who would rather be reading but finds himself accused of lending a 'bad book', American Pastoral, to a minor who subsequently disappears. Perhaps that will make up the lost time -  living vicariously through a book about a librarian who wishes he was living vicariously.