I keep finding Elizabeth Berg books on my shelves and in the stacks of books on my stereo and credenza and elsewhere in my book-glutted house. This week I found Until the Real Thing Comes Along. Last week I discovered two: Joy School and What We Keep. I polished off What We Keep in a few days by reading at night and in waiting rooms, then started on the new one I received just this week, The Last Time I Saw You. I knew I had Pull of the Moon and Talk Before Sleep; I've read and loved both. The latter is the one I took with me to a reading given by the author at our local Barnes & Noble the last weekend in April. If there had been a prize for bringing the oldest or shabbiest paperback form of a best-selling Berg book, I would have won it.
The miracle in finding copies of Berg's books I didn't realize I had is that I didn't find duplicates. I have been known to buy a book and then, unless I read it immediately, I may buy it again, thinking, "I've been wanting to read this book." This becomes especially likely when I'm shopping in our Carmel Public Library Friends Shop, where hardbacks are $3 and paperbacks are less, and I have the pleasant excuse of helping to fund the library by buying a donated book. While sorting through my bookshelves, I found duplicates of The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Scatterfield, The Shape of Sand by Marjorie Eccles, and The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It gets worse. I have bought The Thirteenth Tale three times. The first time I bought it, the book had just been published. I gobbled it up and passed it along to a friend. The next two times, I was buying to replace it, because it was such a good yarn. I had only intended to replace it once. Apparently, there was a blip in my mental inventory of books.
What do I do with the spares? I donate them to the Carmel Public Library Friends Shop, of course. I just have to remember not to buy them back.
Lisa Rice Wheeler, Elizabeth Berg, Kelly O'Dell Stanley
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