Books People Send Me, Installment Two

A couple of days ago I went completely off the rails about the panic attack I had at the world’s biggest Costco— apparently I used all of the f-words left in the world in that post, and this upset certain people who think I need to grow up and get a better vocabulary, people who are not going to like it at all when I inform them that doing so would violate my brand guidelines—when I was supposed to feature the next installment of books people send me. Because I’m a fucking disaster.

Luckily, a reader named Karen who is a children’s librarian here in Cache County, Utah, read past some of those fucks and realized that I have a ton of books that I need to give away. It just so happens that Cache County is one of two counties in Utah that does not have a county-wide library system, so her library in Smithfield relies on a budget from the city to afford books. Smithfield recently slashed her budget, and she can’t purchase the books they need for the library. And that is a fucking shame.

This. This is exactly why I knew I had to feature all these books. I am not a religious person, but I do believe in science and energy and the law of attraction, and I had a gut feeling that if I changed my attitude about all this mail that I get—the time it takes for me to unload it, unpack it, sort it, break down the boxes, and then figure out what to do with it all—that I could transform this endeavor from a chore into one of the best parts of my job.

Which is to say: please send me your books. I will feature them here, and if I don’t get greedy and keep them for myself they will serve the good people of Cache County, Utah, who have a need.

And since this post would not be complete without a tangent, I remember driving through Cache County when I had just gotten pregnant with Leta. Her father and I were on our way to an afternoon hike in the mountains, and I mentioned that I liked the name “Cassius” for a boy. We could call him “Cash” for short because—except he interrupted me and said, no. No way. Never. “Cash” sounded too Southern to him and given that my family uses plastic utensils and paper plates for Thanksgiving dinner, he was already risking his children growing up to possess no class.

Welp. Marlo DID happen.