It’s no secret to those who know me that I love everything about books. Of course I love good content inside them, but I also enjoy well-designed covers that catch my eye, I enjoy the feel of high-quality paper and solid binding. I enjoy the feel of a book: its heft as I hold it in my hand, the feel of the pages as I flip back and forth, the sound of fingers turning pages. I love how they smell, even. Deb can tell you that when I walk into a bookstore, I immediately become distracted from whatever it was I was supposed to be doing and end up perusing all kinds of books. I could easily spend a solid 12 hours in a bookstore and not feel fatigued in the slightest.
So now we come to the problem: at an academic conference like the one I am at, various book publishers will come to sell their wares. Many of them will offer their books at 50% off the retail price. This is a situation that calls into question whether Paul was telling the truth when he said God would not let me be tempted beyond what I could bear. Yes I bought some books, but they were really cheap! Yes I bought some books, but I tried to limit myself to only those that came highly recommended by people I respect or that were directly related to areas I was studying or practicing right now!
Scot McKnight joked that he didn’t care if anyone read his book, as long as they bought it. So now that I have bought the books, I suppose I owe it to myself to actually read them. I can’t wait.
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