I am trying to be more responsible, now that I am old, so for the past few years I have been saving money to pay off a credit card I maxed out three years ago. The interest on this particular card was so horrifically high, and the balance owed so depressing, that for a long time I thought it would never happen. But last week I wrote a check to pay it off, finally, and I put it in an envelope and slapped on a Homer Simpson stamp and put it in the mail and now I am debt free. How grown up.

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To celebrate being debt free, I went shopping. Isn’t human nature bizarre? My rationalizations: 1, Used books are cheap. 2, I have not bought any books since coming back to America, even though they are abundant and tempting. 3, I am running out of books at the town library and a recent forage in my mother’s bookcase turned up only Small Miracles II and A Woman’s Voyage: Tales of Outer Travel and Inner Discovery, both of which I was desperate enough to read. Also, 4, I will pay with cash.

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I bought a whole stack, and put it on my bureau, and it makes me so happy to have a TBR pile again that I am now going to list them in loving detail:

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The Earthsea Trilogy, by Ursula LeGuin. I have been looking for a set of these books for years now, but a very specific edition – the Bantam paperbacks from the mid-seventies, which have maps and woodcut pictures and very beautiful cover paintings. Finding those particular books, all 3, was extremely pleasing.

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Life with Father, by Clarence Day. I love how collecting a series forces you to read odd esoteric books you wouldn’t normally pick up. This book is a very nice Modern Library copy, and it’s good and odd. Apparently it was one of the bestsellers of the 1920s; even reading the dustjacket copy makes me feel like ordering a pink gin and a shingled haircut.

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More Modern Libraries: The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner; New Voices in the American Theatre; and Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a lurid fictionalized biography of Van Gogh. I read this book when I was in college, and have been looking for the ML edition for ages. My new copy comes with a beautifully preserved dustjacket upon which Van Gogh’s most tortured, scabby, nauseous-looking self-portrait is reproduced in color.

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The Bostonians, by Henry James. I like Henry a lot, and haven’t read anything by him since The Spoils of Poynton, last summer, which made me cry.

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. Jenny said this was good; I had only ever read her short stories and The Haunting of Hill House, so when I found out there were more Jackson novels I cackled with delight. However, finding this book took twenty minutes of sorting through the Gothic Romance section, so I am hoping it doesn’t let me down.

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Two under the Indian Sun, and The Diddakoi, and China Court, all by Rumer Godden. Jenny is to blame for these too; she very kindly sent me a copy of In This House of Brede last winter when I was feeling very low and bookless and debt-ridden and depressed; it was so gloriously good, I am on a mission to read all twenty of Godden’s other books. This is my start. It feels good to be out of debt, but it feels better to have reading plans again.