The "new music Tuesday" playlist from Spotify today includes "11," by Hitchhiker, a song that is nearly indescribable. Imagine a psychopath making the "wah-wah-wah" sound that little kids create by smacking their mouths when they're pretending to be Native Americans. (Has society come up with a politically correct alternative to that? Or have children abandoned make-believe in favor of educational iPad games? Cynicism!) Now imagine that sound being ten times more annoying than you ever dreamed possible. It's downright impressive, actually.

"Caught in the Act" is an endearing article on Al Pacino published in the September 15, 2014, edition of The New Yorker. One section in particular focuses on Pacino's admiration for Oscar Wilde and his work. "Part of Pacino's fervor for Wilde comes from a desire to claim the writer's intelligence and eloquence . . . Pacino, whose formal education ended in the tenth grade, grappled for years with a sense of intellectual inadequacy." There's a quote later on from Pacino himself, talking about how he overcomes this on the stage (emphasis added):

You don't need a college education. All the things that you were inhibited to talk about and understand—they can come out in the play. The language of great writing frees you of yourself.

New copier repair man did not come to the office today, so my anticipatory anxiety remains. If the dad from Calvin and Hobbes were here, he'd assure me that this experience will build character. Then I would pack sandwiches and comic books in a knapsack and run away from home with Hobbes.

I'm happy to report that Adam and I had another successful Librarypalooza adventure. He navigated toward the non-fiction this time, and we wound up in an aisle with all sorts of books on American history. (The distribution per topic was perplexing: Native Americans, six shelves; George Washington and the American Revolution, two shelves; James Madison, two books; Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, ten shelves; any other president or important leader or era, four books.)

It struck me as I stood amidst so many nondescript titles with equally nondescript covers that I really don't know which authors to trust when it comes to non-fiction. I loved Gore Vidal's Lincoln, but would I love any other book on the same subject? Are the books in the Local Library's Weirdly Unbalanced History of the United States aisle meant to be enjoyed casually, or are they only in the library for the high school students who need to fulfill a bibliography requirement for an essay?

In the end, I walked away with Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, by Catherine Clinton. I can't imagine how someone could make the Underground Railroad boring, and the gushing reviews on the back cover seemed sincere enough. I also picked up Live and Let Die, the next book in Ian Fleming's Bond series, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman. We celebrated our literary outing with root beer floats, which is one more reason that Adam is the best little brother in the world.

Meanwhile, the new copier repair man is scheduled to diagnose and fix yet another problem at the office tomorrow morning, so if you need me, I'll be building my own underground escape tunnel to anywhere else in time and space.

The rules of Librarypalooza: every month, Adam and I walk to the local library on a Saturday afternoon. One of us selects a random aisle. We must both choose one book from that aisle to read, preferably something we're not incredibly familiar with. We can then take home one or two additional books from anywhere in the library.

The first time we tried this, Adam blindly led us to the aisle that contained all of J.R.R. Tolkien's works, and hoo boy, it was a struggle for me to find anything else I wanted to try out. In the end, I chose Red Mars, the first in a trilogy about humanity colonizing Mars. I mostly picked it because the reviews on the back cover were adorable, and the front cover had this incredibly stereotypical sci-fi illustration. It's exactly the kind of book I want to read but never do because I'm sure it'll be incredibly boring or horribly unrealistic.

It was the best book I've read in years.

The next two books (Green Mars and Blue Mars) were also fantastic, to the point that I can't properly write a review because I just start gushing and babbling and maybe even drooling.

The second Librarypalooza outing put us in the aisle with all of Ian Fleming's books, and since I've only seen the newer Bond movies, I felt like I wanted to know more about this dashing hero and his fancy cars and his pretty ladies and his enviable cocktails. I took home Casino Royale, and wow, the book and the movie overlap for maybe three chapters. I don't want to get shot for telling you which one I prefer, so I'll just tell you that the torture scene was equally unpleasant in both. (Also, the book had terrible pacing, but at least it painted Bond as less of a womanizer.) I look forward to continuing the series.

This weekend, Adam and I are headed out for the third time, and golly gee, I cannot wait. What will the library roulette offer us this time?! Comedy? Romance? Manga? Comedy romance manga? Tune in next week to find out!

*zazzly outro music*