Rainy Day Reads

I buy most of my books used. And one cool thing about used books is that they already come with personal histories. Books with histories are the ones where previous owners have left fun inscriptions or bookplates, and are most likely purchased at a used bookstore. You can tell that they've already been read and loved. They've been dog-eared, annotated, and have the names of previous owners written on the title page. Sometimes I buy books mostly because I think that the bookplates or inscriptions are really interesting. Sometimes I buy books then add annotations, bookplates, and stories of my own. Some of the previous owners have cool names, or someone wrote an interesting note on one of the pages, then obviously gifted the book to someone. I usually take hipster Instagram pictures of cool used books, or of the bookplates. I decided to start sharing these books' histories.

This is my very large and very beautiful volume of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. It's seven hundred pages, with embossed, intricate Celtic designs, gold edged pages, and the size of an old church bible. I purchased it shortly after Christmas last year, and have been chipping away at reading it for the last five months (according to my Goodreads activity). I got it because I love me some Irish folklore; I find it fascinating. You can't go wrong with folk tales that tell the legends of a giant named 'Finn MacCool'. There's a fantastical 'magic-is-always-around-the-corner' feel that permeates these tales, and they have a very 'telling stories passed down from generations past around the family hearth' vibe. I find short story compilations slightly discombobulating. I have no problem with a 700 page book when it's all one linear plot, but to have roughly 70 10(ish) page stories makes it hard to stay focused, because you're always

~Due to some serious wildfires, the sky in my area was covered in smoke for an extended amount of time. It turned the sky various shades of pink, and caused all the sunlight to be an eerie shade of red. One day, I was sitting in a coffee shop with a friend, lit by this strange weird orangey-ness that was the sky, writing cliche poems about being excited for Fall, and she made a joke about how the sun looked like it was dying, prompting this.~ The sun was dying. It cast it's dimming, orange light on the city, but no one noticed or cared. If anyone did happen to note anything, they merely drew scarves over their faces, muttering about wildfires and smoke, blown in from the gorge, and moved on with their lives. But the smoke wasn’t what was causing the various shades of pink and orange in the sky. It was the sun dying. It sputtered, trying to stay alive, trying to continue to provide life and warmth to the solar system. But the fuel was exha