Here are some as-yet-unshared pictures from my visit to the Central Library in Indianapolis. Aka, the Library of Dreams and Wonder.

I love to read. If my blog archives had not been cruelly ravaged/deleted (still in mourning), I would direct you to the approximately twenty books I reviewed at the end of last summer. This year has hit me particularly hard with reading for classes, so I haven’t had so much time for fun books.

I blame physics class, my long Irish literature paper, and the spring’s twenty-two credits hours and the nine credits of English class included in that count. I blame Emily Dickinson and the Romantic poets and Herman Melville and the giant Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism and Theory I read at night and over breakfasts.

Not that literary theory isn’t fun. I love throwing around words/phrases like “hermeneutical,” “accomplished nihilist,” and “always already.” It just tends to take me a good hour or so of research to understand the basic outline of the concepts used to describe lit theory. I love the wacked-out, odd-ball things text does. I don’t so much love the headache of arriving at that conclusion. (Well, sometimes. If I understand the process, it’s wonderful.)

As I read more and more, the process becomes easier. That is to say, I don’t have to stop and decipher all those “hermeneutical,” “binary opposition,” “signifier,” and “de Manian” references.

Still, I miss quick jaunts in and out of BookWorld à la Fforde (finished One of Our Thursday is Missing–very good, not his best work, but I still read into the night to finish it). During the year, I managed to make time for a visit to Indianapolis’ huge-normous Central Library. Consider proximity to the Library of Dreams and Wonder one of the perks of attending Butler University. Pictures, commence:

The main lobby/atrium

It's HUGE!

Chilling in the sweet chairs in the kids' section.