"Do people keep books?"

I. "Do people keep books?"

I was unpacking a box of donated books and groaned when I saw another set of Stieg Larsson's Millenium series.  

The Girl with Dragon Tattoo is the first of these crime books.*

Its original title in Swedish was The Man Who Hated Women. >
(The original cover is not pretty in any way.)

One of my managers happened to be nearby when I unpacked them. 
I commented that for some reason we've gotten several sets of these books donated in the past couple months. 

I showed him a cover.

"Wasn't that a movie?" he asked.

It was, I said.
Everyone must have bought the books at the same time, and then decided to get rid of them at the same time too.

"Do people keep books?" he asked.

It took me a second to even register the meaning of that question. I just said, "Yeah!"

That question better than anything else illustrates what different worlds my coworkers and I live in.
But there are others.

II. What's Normal

Also yesterday, I asked a coworker who is something of a lay Christian minister (I think?) if he wanted a book about Catholic ministry. 
He said yes, he was interested because he didn't know anything about Catholicism.

I asked him what religion he was, and he told me he's Pentecostal.

"I'm Catholic... sort of," I said.

"Sort of?" he asked.

"Well, yeah, I'm Catholic, but I don't go to church or anything."

"You don't go to church?" He seemed surprised. "Why not?"

Now, this guy and I have a pleasant working relationship, but he has never asked me a personal question. 
Not one.
So, trying to explain my religious worldview out of the blue, it just felt too much. 

"Oh, I just got out of the habit," I said.

"Missing church is like missing work," he said.

That seemed a little odd to me at first--comparing church to an onerous duty... Like, as if you said seeing a friend was like going to work. 
But I think he just meant it's something you do without thinking, "Should I?"

III. Eye Level

Oh, and also yesterday [what was yesterday?] one of the old, white church ladies who volunteer on Wednesdays [is there something about Wednesdays?] came up to me quietly in the books section to discuss something serious with me:
Would I consider moving the Bibles from the bottom shelf, where I'd moved them?

"It's a matter of respect," she said. "Some of us were talking about it, and it doesn't seem respectful that they're down there by the floor. Could they be at eye level, where they used to be?"

My instant reaction was TOTAL ANNOYANCE.
Luckily I kept it inside. I explained my reasoning:
some of the Bibles are big and heavy, altogether they're easy to spot, and I'd rather keep religious books with narrow, harder-to-read spines at eye level.

This did not wash. She repeated it was a matter of respect.

My brain was playing a FURIOUS game of Ping-Pong, making up things I could lob at her... ["Is it OK if I put the Talmud and the Quran down there?"]

But you know, I caught myself.
She wasn't attacking anything. She was respectfully asking me to take care of some books she loves and honors. Did I need to make it a problem?

I thought, What the hell? Why not take her request at face value.
So I gathered myself and said, "Well, I do have this empty shelf higher up over here, on this wooden bookshelf..." 

And they did look nice on the wood shelf.

IV. The Eye of the Beholder

A couple weeks earlier, however, I'd had a very different call to respect the Bible. An old black lady who browses the store regularly took me to task for putting out some broken Bibles for free, in the entryway. [I mention race because it seems to be aligned with different religious attitudes & affiliations, in these cases.]

"Those Bibles are no good," she said. "You shouldn't put those out. It's disrespectful!"

I explained that I put them out for free rather than throw them out.
"I thought it would be worse to put them in the garbage."

She didn't think so. "Would you want one of those old Bibles? You wouldn't! It's not respectful." 

(By the way, there's no scriptural or doctrinal reason you can't throw out a Christian Bible. I gather it's different with the Hebrew Bible, the Torah.)

I was baffled until it dawned on me that she didn't locate respect in BOOK, the object of paper and ink; the insult was to PEOPLE--I was disrespecting them by offering them shoddy Bibles.

Half the Bibles had already been taken, but I went and threw the rest out. I don't care--they are paper and ink, and God knows we get a TON of them--way more, even than copies of Scandinavian crime novels. 

V. An Angel on My Shoulder

Yeah, so... sometimes I leave work feeling wrung out.
It reminds me of how tiring it is to speak a foreign language.  

Luckily there are those at work who speak my language.

________________
*Side note: Looking up the correct spelling of the author's name, I read that Larsson based his main character, Lisbeth Salander, partly on Pippi Longstocking.

From an interview in the Washington Post: [published, as were all his books, after his death]:

Henning Mankell [author of Inspector Wallender series] dislikes talking about a Swedish crime fiction genre, saying that above all he has been inspired by Sherlock Holmes and classical Greek drama.

"Of course, I also read Sjowall-Wahloo but one must not forget that they in turn were very influenced by Ed McBain, and who influenced Ed McBain? He was absolutely influenced by Sherlock Holmes," Mankell says.

As for Steig Larsson, he primarily drew inspiration from British and American authors such as Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid and Elizabeth George. Salander's character, however, was inspired by the strong-willed redhead Pippi Longstocking in the children's books by the late Astrid Lindgren.

"What would she have been like today? What would she have been like as an adult? What would she be called? A sociopath?" Larsson told book store industry magazine Svensk Bokhandel in the only interview he ever did about his crime fiction. "I created her as Lisbeth Salander, 25 years old and extremely isolated. She doesn't know anyone, has no social competence."

I found several images of Lisbeth as Pippi online. Here's one by Grobi-Graphik from Deviantart:

What would my Orphan Red Dolls grow up to be like? Luckily, they have not been abused, unlike Salander--at least not while they've been with me...