Library Etiquette and Bookery

I would just like to say, for the record, that regular rules of etiquette still apply while you are in a library. If a librarian (or page) is helping another patron, this is not a good time to ask them questions and demand that they help you now. If you are waiting in line, it is not appropriate to cut in front of other people. If a librarian tells you that they're really sorry, but they can't renew your book, because you've renewed it too many times already and there are holds on it, it is appropriate to give the books up with grace, or keep the book and pay the fines like a man. (And this wasn't even a book they needed for research- it was a novel.) Seriously. You would think they were raised in a barn.

Thankfully, most of the time libraries are happy lovely places filled with books, which I generally really like. And, thankfully, my summer reading program has been going quite well. The book that I am currently reading is called Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals by John Lawson. It's sort of slow going, but very interesting, since he looks at a lot of beliefs in Greek villages and tries to connect them to ancient religion. It was written sometime in the early 1900s, and sometimes this is very obvious- I have a feeling that the observation, "The ordinary Greek of the mainland... is usually of a mongrel and unattractive appearance; and in view of the marked difference of the type in regions untouched by the Slavs, I cannot but impute his lack of beauty to his largely Slavonic ancestry" (27) would probably not make it into an academic work today.

For the mathematically minded among you, (or for anyone who thinks math is even vaguely interesting) I would reccomend Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis. It's a novel about two obsessions, a boy's obsession with the past of his mysterious uncle, and the uncle's obsession with number theory and, in particular, Goldbach's conjecture. It's a short little book- I started it yesterday after dinner, and had it finished by the time I went to bed, with time in there to watch the Colbert Report. It's also sort of light on plot and characterization- the math takes a much more central place than any of the characters other than the boy and Uncle Petros. But it's a really interesting portrait of mathematics and genius and obsession and failure. I think that this book is probably better if you understand the math involved, but I've taken Calc 1 and some basic number theory and never felt lost.