Inventory: 0
Points: 48.8
Mooched/given: 429/289
Pending mooch/give: 0/0
Mooch ratio: 1.47:1

Wishlist: 801
Feedback: +289
Smooches: 59
Charitable gifts: 34
Charity received: 18
Friends: 36
Cancelled requests: 20
Books receiving lost: 12
Rejected requests: 1

Will send: worldwide
Joined: 2007/06/11
Last here: 3000 days ago
(possibly inactive)
Country: Italy

Books in inventory: 0

INVENTORY >

Status message:

We are non-smokers but have three cats.

Mooching from me is free for charities, I'll gift points back after the mooch.

At the moment I'm very busy, for the time being mooches will be mailed once a week, every Saturday

Bio:
I am an addict.

It has been going on for a very long time, since I was 3, more or less, but it dawned on me just last time I went to town.

It didn’t matter that I already had what I came to buy, it didn’t matter that the stock was more or less the same all over.

I just HAD to enter each and every bookstore on my route.

I don’t buy all the times, of course, at least I’m left with enough restraint for that, otherwise I’ll be living under a bridge by now (and were would I keep the books, in that case?), but enter I must, ‘ to have a look’, as I justify to myself giving in to the impulse.

I have to see the walls covered with shelves, filled with books of every shape and size; I have to breathe in the smell of paper and ink; I have to weight a mint-new paperback in my hands, opening it with care, like you open the door of a new friend’s home.

There is the thrill of the hunt as well, exploring a new bookstore like one would explore a forest, avoiding carefully the lions’ den of the best-sellers aisle to find, hidden in a corner, the enchanted glade of the forgotten classics. The foreign-language shelves sing softly and sweetly to me, as a flock of exotic birds and the used-book section (when there’s one) is a treasure trove of strange topics and hidden little gems.

It’s all my parents fault, of course.

It was father that when I was ill read Aesop’s fables to me, making all the different voices. It was mother who read me fairy tales at night and the Bible for children in the morning.
It was them who started buying ‘the Best Tales of the World’ in weekly issues ‘for their children’ before even getting married, and for years a custom-bound volume of those tales was my eagerly anticipated birthday present.
It was them that introduced me to Verne, Pearl Buck, Cronin and later to their own collection of classical Russian novels: thus I met Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Puskin and the most loved of them all, Dostoevskij.

It was father that brought home from his school books that otherwise would have been thrown away, it was mother with whom I roamed the used-book stalls so that we could buy more books than we could have done in a bookstore.

Is it a wonder that I came out with this addiction?

No, thank you. Really, I do appreciate your concern, it’s very kind of you, but I don’t need to be cured.

I can stop when I want.

bookstore window
beyond the mirror await
countless paths

(copyright: Marina Bonomi, 2007)

Forums joined:
books_by_authors_of_color_recommendations.

Forums active on:
books_by_authors_of_color_recommendations.

MORE FORUM INFO >