I had a bit of a pleasant surprise in the reading department this week.

I have a running list of books that I want to read. I've been keeping the list for years, ever since I realized that I would buy a book and then not get around to reading it for months, by which time it would frequently be out in paperback. Adding insult to injury, I was finding that a lot of the books that I bought weren't as good as I had thought they would be. I seemed to have developed the gift of hitting the best part when I was skimming it in the bookstore, and finding out only at home that the rest was not up to that standard. So I started my list. When I took a year off, I promised myself that I would get the list down. At its peak, it was up around 75 books, and I did get it down -- to about 68; hardly as many as I wanted to have read during that hiatus.

About two weeks ago, I realized that the list was pretty big again, and since I was looking for something to read that wasn't technical (or at least not intensely so), I thought to order some books through my local library's interlibrary loan system. My library has a somewhat cumbersome process for doing that. It's manual, and it uses a different ILL order card depending on whether the book is being reserved within the library, ordered from the library system of which they're a part, or ordered from another system entirely. That might make sense to a librarian, but it makes no sense to me. On a couple of occasions, I was halfway through a card before realizing it was the wrong one. What joy! What made all of this particularly irritating is that I had the info on the book -- title, author, ISBN - already keyed into spreadsheet that I had made while searching the library system through the Internet. To then take the digital information and hand write it so that someone else could key it into another computer system was offensive to my sense of How Things Should Be (which, admittedly, is sometimes much sterner than it ought to be). Plus, I notice that the more I have to write, the less legible my writing becomes. I'm sure the librarians really enjoy that.

So this week, I thought to ask the librarians if I could do it digitally -- fill out a form on line, or send them an email with my requests. To my surprise, they said yes. Its clearly something that, if lots of people asked for it, they'd not do, but I gather that this is an unusual request for them, and they were willing to honor it. I even told them that I'd be willing to pay a premium for this additional service. I think a buck a book would be reasonable. I suggested that they consider adding this feature to their web site. Doubt that will happen, though -- I get the impression they are part of The Official Library Computer System, and changes are not made to that lightly.

Still, I'm pleased. Now I just want to see if the books ordered this way actually do come. I hope so -- I just added two books (The BeeKeeper’s Apprentice, and The Working Poor) to the list. Gotta read, gotta read.