The Intrepid Hermit

One of the best and possibly the only reliable and constant companion for an intrepid hermit is the written word. All you other nerds out there know what I'm talking about. I would say at least half the furniture in my house functions to hold books up. In other words, I have a lot of books. Believe it or not, when I moved across the country I got rid of about seven boxes of books and I still have so many left that I'm always tripping over them. Lately I've noticed I have this bad habit of buying a book, reading it once, and then never touching it again. It sits on my shelf, collecting dust and taking up space until I send it off to a used book store. It's kind of a wasteful habit. So, in addition to my six month ban on new clothes, I'm also going to limit my book purchases. My first step in going through with this plan was to get a library card again. I've been going without one for three years now. I honestly don't know how I let that happen. I should be ashamed of myself.

My neighborhood library has a great graphic novel section and one of the books I checked out was "a novel in pictures" called The Three Incestuous Sisters by Audrey Niffenegger (you might know her better as the author of The Time Travelers Wife). It's a wonderfully weird and sad book. A story about a tragic jealousy between sisters. It's illustrated with beautiful, dark aquatints. Apparently Niffenegger spent 14 years working on the book and letting it evolve into different forms. I'm inspired by this fact because it often takes me long periods of time to get some of my work done. I always wondered why my other artist friends could focus on one thing and get it done in a relatively short period of time, but I always work on about ten things at once and then they don't get done for ages.