a proposition

I have a problem.
Or shall I begin more obliquely, with an echo:
I am a sick woman, a wicked woman. If I had in my pocket our last desperate dollars and happened upon a used bookstore, I'd slouch helplessly through the door. In such a store the first thing that hits you is the smell: old ink and yellowed paper (air, light and lignin), and something musty that's difficult to place...the detritus of past ownership, perhaps, a heady smell. There's also a particular auditory effect at work, a muffling, that envelopes the visitor. Then, and maybe most significantly, comes the excision; one becomes alone, fixed in the present. One loses companionship, history, expectation. In the aisles I'd begin to feel the first pricks of guilt as I slid first one then another book from its space and flicked furtively through the pages, waiting for the bite. You might imagine that the septic feeling of guilt would urge me to abandon my course. On the contrary, even my guilt has a certain pleasing flavor to me.

Once the bite came, quick and catching, I'd stow the book beneath an arm and make my way to the register. Inwardly seething with pride over the quality of my taste, the singular, indisputable rightness of my selection, I'd make my purchase, declining a bag out of a vain desire to showcase, subtly but plainly, the caliber of my choice and the charm of my bookish character. Back on the street my guilt would return in the baffled outrage I could predict on the face of my husband, the disappointment, and my insides would cringe in anticipation of the coming confrontation. As I walked, hunched over my most recent acquisition, my palms would begin to sweat, then my brow, followed by chills, tremors...Would the ferocity of this panic turn me around? Urge me to return the book? Of course not. Is is wickedness that compels me? How describe need? how explain pleasure?

Then, April 9th, I lay half insensate on a cruciform table in surgery: a cut, two emphatic cries, and I am made a mother, milk and salt. Perhaps it has to do with their lengthy hospital tenure (being premature), or maybe the trauma of those long wakeful weeks before I even had the chance to hold my daughter (who suffered the difficulties of patent ductus arteriosus), maybe it is my lack of engagement in my job, or maybe it would have come out of me anyway right alongside the afterbirth, but it turns out I have an implacable need to care for them myself, at least for now. To do this, financially, sacrifices must be made. In other words, all that is inessential in terms of housing, sustenance and utility must be pared away. While I could make all sorts of clever arguments about why books are essential, the truth is that I would rather be with my twins than work to support my habit...I think. So, with this tenuous assertion in hand, begins the year of no books bought.

Premise: I will read all the books currently sitting unread on my shelves, and I will engage with heretofore neglected texts by writing about them. All the new books I encounter will be either borrowed or received as gifts, no exceptions.

Predictions: Weakness. There may be failures, lapses, embarrassments. Perseverance will prevail.