Last night a book made me physically ill.

It wasn’t a Gray’s Anatomy book, although my longstanding aversion to televised surgeries is probably a good indicator about that particular tome having a similar effect. Nor was it a Grey’s Anatomy book, although I also suspect that I would have found that to be revolting in its own right.

The book that made me sick came from the library. Like all the cool kids, I’ve been taking advantage of our local library system to help feed my book craving as we march through this wintry economic climate. There have been a few minor issues along the way. For one thing, I needed to get over my instinctive desire to actually possess the books I read, to turn that last page and put it on a shelf like some sort of trophy marking my accomplishment. More problematically, I have an unfortunate habit of viewing the online reserve system like a Netflix queue, piling book upon book on there expecting they’ll arrive at whatever leisurely pace I adopt to consume them. That’s decidedly not the case, and I often go to claim my latest held tome to be handed a pile that immediately seems impossible to complete, especially since my reading pace has dropped significant since my youthful days when I could race from cover to cover with happy speed (to be a little fair to myself, that decrease may have something to do with the fact that my literary aspirations have migrated to Pynchon from Wolfman).

These, as you can tell, are minor problems. Last night I encountered a new dilemma, entirely unique to relying upon borrowed books. I cracked open a copy of E.L. Doctorow’s latest and began the left-to-right perusal of nouns, verbs and other assorted building blocks of language. In short order, my nose began to wrinkle in disgust, and I couldn’t quite process why. It wasn’t the prose. That only happens when I read Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. I pulled the book closer to me and inhaled deeply. It absolutely reeked of cigarettes, as if the previous borrower had not only chain smoked throughout the reading of the book, but had done so inside of a tightly confined area like a broom closet or a coffin. Or maybe the person actively shared their smokes with the book, placing the filter between loosely closed pages and letting the novel enjoy all that rich, mentholy goodness on its own. I thought it odd, even off-putting, but I figured I could persevere. The book had sat in the house for a week or two before I cracked it, and I hadn’t noticed the smell previously. Besides, I grew up around so many smokers that I was practically raised inside a chimney. This couldn’t stop me.

I was wrong. I got around 25 pages in before the headache became nearly unbearable, the nasty scent slowly, subtly wearing away at my apparently delicate senses. The book goes back tomorrow, and I find myself perplexed over how to ask for only non-smoking editions in the future.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)