One of the most heartbreaking things about moving to school last year was deciding which books came with me and which didn’t. In my room here at home i have a floor to ceiling bookshelf overflowing with all of the paperbacks i’ve ever bought – thousands of dollars worth of print, easily. Last year i had enough room in my dormitory for roughly ten books. I brought The Bell Jar, The Collected Sylvia Plath, The Trick is to Keep Breathing & Foreign Parts (galloway), The Sun the Moon and the Stars (brust), the trio of Dante’s books, and The Secret of Possesing Joy (walker). However, during the year i added quite a few novels to this number, both by bringing them from home and buying them. When i moved out on Friday i took with me The Beach & Tesseract (both Garland), 3 X-Men books (golden), The Right Stuff & The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (wolfe), Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (Thompson), everything Hitchhikers (Adams, one by Gaiman), Neverwhere (also Gaiman), and The Death and Life of Superman. Of these, i’ve elected a scant few to stay on the bookshelf in my new apartment. Considering that i’ve (re-)read them all in the past year this might seem silly, but i enjoy the comfort of having my most cherished words nearby.