'I feel that the care of libraries and the use of books, and the knowledge of books, is a tremendously vital thing, and that we who deal with books and who love books have a great opportunity to bring about something in this country which is more vital here than anywhere else, because we have the chance to make a democracy that will be a real democracy.' 
                                                                                                                     ― Eleanor Roosevelt

Books are all I really buy. I don't feel a need to buy much else. No more drinks. Sometimes I'll buy a book a second time when it comes out in paperback just because I loved it so or I like the look of it smaller and want to read it over again in paper like when we were younger. Yesterday I bought the paperback of Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer. I started reading it again last night. It's as breathtakingly serious and smart and dazzlingly funny as it was the first time.  

Filled with coffee from breakfast with a friend in from Cleveland. I just looked at the Times. I'm not a big weekend newspaper reader. News items aren't as immediate come Saturday. Weekdays I like better. There's a weekday pace even to newspapers that's better. I set the alarm for the same time every day hoping to keep a Monday-Friday tempo on weekends. It doesn't work though. People will wait in long lines for brunch to kill the time. 

'Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.'
                                                                                    ― Carl Sagan

It was cold today with the sign on Chambers Street. But the sky was wonderfully gray like a Thomas Hardy novel. Snow was coming. I listened to 'John Wesley Harding' when I got home. I had the album in college in 1968. I can see it sitting on the top of some kind of high table we had. It came out around Christmas. I played it a lot.

'Health and literacy are deeply connected because a quality education is at the core of sustaining a healthy life,' said Linda C. Mayes, M.D., the Arnold Gesell Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Psychology, and director of the Yale Child Study Center.

'For kids who are exposed to books at home, the loss of a library is sad. But for kids who come from environments where people don't read, the loss of a library is a tragedy that might keep them from ever discovering the joys of reading-or from gathering the kind of information that will decide their lot in life.'
                                  ― Michael Moore