March Photo Challenge: Guilty Pleasure

I used to buy all used copies of books. Why spend the money on the new ones when I was just going to wear them out? I don’t remember the name of the site now, but I was part of this club at one point where I could trade back and forth with other members and get new “old” books all the time, just for the cost of shipping.

And then I discovered SERIES. Beautiful. Matching. SERIES.

You can’t just go buy used copies of them, because you’ll almost never find a matching set. It is possible, but difficult. Especially in the right condition. And it is so much lovelier to find them in a boxed set, if they come that way! Of course, that means I can’t buy it until after I’ve already borrowed the entire thing from the library…or wait until I buy it to read it. Catch-22!

Still, buying whole series and seeing their gorgeousness is definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. These are just a few of them, I have many more!

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Favorite Guilty Pleasure

I shared this picture a few days early, when I picked it off my bookshelf. There are some books you just CRAVE to read over and over, and this is mine.

 

I started reading The Thorn Birds years ago, before I was really old enough to understand everything that was going on. In fact, I remember having to ask my mom to explain some of the more…ahem…romantic parts. I had just pulled it off the shelf because it was thick and ORANGE, so it had probably caught my young eyes as something intriguing.

I can’t tell you what draws me back to this over and over, other than it is so familiar and delicious to me, it is like a big piece of chocolate cake. I know that I rescued this copy from one of my mom’s garage sale piles–when I found she was getting rid of it, I quickly snagged it up, and now it’s mine. The pages are falling out of it–the binding is in utter shreds because I have read it so many times. Every time I read it I tell myself just to go buy a new copy, but somehow, this one goes back on the shelf, and that new copy never appears. And next time I’m ready, the musty, yellow pages welcome me home again.