If I feel like shopping, instead of going to a store sometimes I drift around the nonfiction stacks and check out a pile of books, even though I will probably have time to read only one. This is way better than buying clothes that turn out to look bad on me outside of a dressing room or sports equipment I'll never use.
For browsing purposes I prefer the nonfiction stacks. One, because the books are newer-looking (nonfiction sounds kind of scary, so its books don't get as grubby as, say, any of our books by James Patterson). Two, the books are shelved by subject. Fiction is arranged by author, which means the fiction's section is actually a jumble. Jeffrey Eugenides is next to Janet Evanovich and Sophie Kinsella and Rudyard Kipling are cover to cover, and I have to think in order to choose between them.
But if I go to a certain place in the nonfiction stacks I have all the books written by people who gave up their perfectly good jobs to go live in Europe, or all the books on how to make cute crafty things, or all the CDs that teach Hindi. Then you pick out the ones that catch your eye, hand over your card, and cart them all home. It's exactly like shopping.
I love this idea! This is similar to what I've been doing lately, which is guiltily sneaking into the nutrition books section, which I've been overdosing on lately. It's that same feeling of "I shouldn't be doing this, but oh well!" which is the same feeling I get when I shop.
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