little screens

TV has a way of grabbing hold of me. Sucking me in. And draining me of life and spirit. Call it an addictive personality, if you will, but I'm the type that can lose entire days to Real World marathons and watch ESPN's SportsCenter repeatedly... never tiring of the Top 10 plays of the day.

But it's an incredibly passive pastime. Not to mention, a huge waste of time. So today, holed up in my cottage in Rosemary Beach during a horrible rainstorm, and becoming increasingly more depressed and disgusted by the drivel on TV, I ventured out to this awesome local bookstore.

Now, I forgot how much I like bookstores. Not the big, overwhelming, non-personal chains run by teenagers who barely know how to read. I'm talking about nice independent, non-intimidating niches with literary-minded folk running the show. The kind of place you could spend all day in, never growing tired of picking books up based solely on their covers. The kind where a simple conversation about Graham Greene's The Comedians leads you past Cormac McCarthy's The Road and to Dave Egger's new book - What is the What - which I currently cannot put down. Which means that I also forgot how much I enjoy reading.