Forty Days and Forty Nights

Recently, I vowed to stop buying books in order to save up for more important things. Think of it as a booklover's Lent, a prolongued forty days and forty nights in the wilderness--desert--facing temptation. Except the wilderness is my workplace, a bookstore, and the temptation of Satan is Dan Brown and his Da Vinci Code (just kidding!). So I give up books, but as you know some bacchanal (wild, footloose celebration) of sin has to happen beforehand, so I picked up a copy of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (for Viv) and the New American library anthology of Lovecraft's Tales (for me). What can I say? It was pay day.