Hold that place

I'm sure I'm not the only person reading more than one book at a time. This kind of attention division to females would cause me being labelled a casanova. If I were a kid, I'd more likely than not be put on Ritalin.

All this book-philia leads to problems. I found this really nice used-book place while driving through Redmond. On a lazy saturday afternoon, I decided to check it out. The next thing I know, I am walking out with three books, $15 lighter in my wallet(you should buy used books - great for your pocketbook) . I found a few more books there, but common sense prevailed, and I decided that scaling my ambitions wouldn't be such a bad thing.

The books were:

1. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
2. October Sky - based on Saket's glowing review and a movie viewing three years back.
3. Effective C++ by Scott Myers

The challenge here is keeping track of page numbers. If it's a book or two, remembering page numbers is easy. But when you get to a level of insanity like mine (sometimes I read four books at a time), you tend to use bookmarks.

I started out with random pieces of paper - library checkout slips, receipts, but now I have a full-fledged new interest - bookmarks. Not of the del.icio.us variety but the colored, laminated paper variety.

I have an interesting collection now:

1. A purchased one from the Museum of Flight called "Celestial Fireworks". This is the only one I've actually purchased.
2. A CRY brochure that came in the mail.
3. A promotion for a Shakespeare production in Pittsburgh. (Picked up at the Craig Street Coffee House over two years back)
4. A thick card with the year's top books (picked up at the local library).
5. An advertisement for a new production of The Little Prince. (Picked up at the local Starbucks)
6. A promotion for the Princeton Review. Better SAT/GRE/GMAT scores guaranteed!

It's becoming a bit of a hobby now. Except for the first one, which I actually bought, the others are all picked up for free. The most hilarious one I remember seeing was by the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction Institute) in CMU. They had one which said something to the effect - "User Studies show that using this bookmarks helps improve memory of current page numbers among subjects." I'd love to get my hands on that now.