-- a shadow from her increasingly tenebrous past --

I saw that line on the back cover of a novel this morning and had to look up what tenebrous meant. It means dark and shadowy; I'm just surprised to find it in a blurb (a rather unflattering word for the summation of what a book's about, either on the inside of the dust jacket of a hardcover or on the back of a paperback) as they are typically written, like newspaper articles in the United States, on an average fourth-grade reading level. Heck, for all I know Jeffrey who's finishing fourth grade this month and Sarah who's finishing fifth (and also her time at Longfellow) could tell me what it means without looking it up! They are learning a lot, more than I did at their age!


Besides, I find that phrase a great introduction for another of my "by the numbers" posts!


79. Minot Public Library's book sale in its last three hours Saturday (it always ends on a Saturday) has a bag sale where you can buy as many books and other media, for they sell VHS tapes and DVDs as well, as you can fit into a bag for three dollars each. And for me this was a God moment, for Martha and Sarah were at a baby shower for Martha's boss Becky and Jeffrey I'd just brought to a friend's birthday party at HighAir Ground so I'd have nobody to tell me "hurry up" or "I'm bored". It was bliss. I went in before work Friday and picked up four books for three dollars (hardcovers are a dollar, paperbacks are fifty cents) and I've become expert at bag-stuffing, fitting as many books as you can in a single paper grocery bag.


And of the seventy-nine -- come on, you knew the number was going to be significant at some point! -- books total that I got from this book sale (I got home afterward and wrote the list of them out while waiting for Martha, Sarah, and Jeffrey to get there) there's books I have read like Harry Turtledove's Colonization trilogy, books I'd like to read like David McCullough's Truman, books I may not read like Arthur C. Clarke's The Third Industrial Revolution, and quick reads like Mark Twain: Wit and Wisecracks which I was hoping to read in a day but got bogged down in a few other things. That, and there's only so much Mark Twain I can take in a single dose. I mentioned this at church Sunday to a friend of Sarah and Jeffrey's and she said she thinks her grandfather reads his books. Ouch! 


123. The numeric day of the year May 3 is. This year. If this were a leap year, with the addition of February 29th it would be day 124.


1909. Selma Lagerlöf won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. Doesn't ring a bell? That's ok, about the only thing I could think of was that she'd won (she's also the first woman and the first Swedish citizen to win it) when I was in ReStore a few weeks ago and found Selma Lagerlöf's Words of Love and Wisdom (ISBN 1572160322) a thin and stimulating collection from her books. Maybe a little pithy by today's standards, but somebody we need to hearken back to something simpler to know what we're about.


And with that sentence, I realize I'm getting to sound simpler.


So I step back, David