From Wachowski to Nietzsche

This evening Sarah and I went to the library to return the books we borrowed to entertain ourselves on the way to and from Italy. We had a few novels, three travel books on Italy, and one non-fiction.

I find great irony in the diversity of books in a library. On one shelf you can find books on philosophy by Nietzsche, Plato, and Marcus Aurelius; walk down one shelf and you will find The Redneck Night Before Christmas. Go to the art section and you will find Monet on the same shelf as The Art of The Matrix by the Wachowski brothers.

In spite of the great diversity, it seems I can never find what I want. First of all, the Dewey Decimal System makes sense on paper, but I can never seem to find anything with it in real life. Secondly, whenever I am looking for a certain subject, they never seem to have the exact book that I want.

I usually go in to find a book in one topic but in trying to find that one book I stumble across other interesting books and stop and browse them for a little while. The short trip to the library ends up taking hours.

By the time I am done in the library, three or four hours later, I have managed to find three or four books from completely unrelated topics that look moderately interesting. Victory! Unfortunately the sweet taste of victory is short lived due to my inabiliy to straighten my neck after twisting it at an uncomfortable angle for hours to read the book titles.