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Entry 5 -- Surprising Book Help[]
Are you tired of hearing about assholes? Don't tell me you don't like profanity or that I shouldn't swear. Grownups, and it's grownups who usually complain, swear plenty. Hypocrites have no business complaining. Anyway, I figure you are still tired of assholes.
Fortunately, I got a break from them at lunch. I also managed to avoid the hall monitors. There are fewer of them in high school and maybe they were all eating. I made it to the library and ducked inside. It surprised me how crowded the place was. There was a line of students waiting to use the internet. The librarian asked me to take a number.
I told her instead that I had come to look for a book. Her face lit up and her eyes flashed with a peculiar kind of joy that said "oh boy, I have a real customer!"
"I need..." now it was my turn to feel stupid, but maybe the librarian knew something about books. "I need...a book that is good literature, no genre books, that tells a story about someone who is a scientist or an engineer or how something gets made, but it has to be quality fiction. I've got to write a critique of it for English."
The librarian nodded and smiled. She asked if I could read a collection of short stories, and I said I didn't think so. She checked a bunch of books that she called a Reader's Advisory and then she asked if I minded a long book.
"As long as it's good, I don't mind," I said. The problem is there's a lot of bad books out there.
That was how she showed me the Fountainhead which is about an architect who worked on construction projects when he was younger. It was by a woman I called Ayn (pronounced "ain") Rand. The librarian told me the author pronounced her first name "I-in." I thought that was strange but people sometimes mispronounce my own name too.
I checked out the book after reading the first chapter. It was a pretty good book. At least it was not a sappy love story and architects are educated people who go to university. I figured the role models would do me some good and make me feel good.
I took my book outside to the hill and didn't get to finish all my lunch, I got so involved in the reading. It was pretty clear Ayn Rand thought guys who worked construction were cute and that they were daredevils. Real working people like my dad are afraid of getting hurt. No one would like to ccatch rivets if they had to do it nine to five to pay the rent. It might be fun for one day, but not the way Ms. Rand described it.
I was still thinking of rivet catching when the sixth period bell rang and it was time to escape inisde. For forty-five brief minutes, I had been asshole free.