I spent much of the summer trying to curb a habit—actually, it was more like curing an addiction. For years, whenever I ran out of something to read, I would go to the bookstore. It’s not as though the library was inconvenient; it was literally right around the corner. It’s just that I love owning books, having bookcases overflowing, tables piled high. I have rarely re-read a book—except by accident when, on about page 50, I acknowledge that niggling feeling that this is all sounding very familiar—but I like knowing the book is right there if I ever do want to read it again. Whenever I thought about cost, I argued that books come under the category of “household necessities” and that the independent bookstore is a dying breed that needs my support. Then, a couple of months ago, I faced the fact that I had to change my ways. I needed to be more frugal, and it was time to start getting rid of things rather than acquiring more. And, yes, I forced myself to admit, books really are “things.” What if something happened to me and strangers talked about how many books were in the house—like they do when someone leaves a lot of cats! The time had come: I would start using the library.

All summer I never got past the first bookcase to the left of the entrance—new fiction. I would come home with three books at a time—mostly titles I’d never heard of by authors I didn’t know—and read fast and furiously. Helen of Troy by Margaret George is a long work of historical fiction. I am always impressed by how a writer can take a few facts about a figure from history or previous literature and imagine a whole background, personality, and motivation for that person. In this case, Helen becomes a much more sympathetic character in the hands of George than she was in Homer’s, but the heroes and gods were perhaps better off left in the Iliad. A hero can’t remain epic with too many dimensions.

Dog Dead by David Rosenfelt caught my attention because of the handsome golden retriever on the cover. It’s a bit of a misnomer to call the book a “mystery” since the plot is not highly suspenseful and is somewhat unnecessarily complex. But the funny, likable, somewhat cynical voice of the narrator and, of course, the dog, made it fun to read.

I found The Savage Garden by Mark Mills to be very well written, with some twists at the end which are surprising but believable. The narrator is a young man who goes to Italy to research a villa’s eighteenth century garden in an attempt to find clues to the murder of the original owner’s young wife. He finds clues to murder beyond those the garden holds, but there is a whole level of intrigue going on to which he is oblivious until the end. The book has a strong sense of place and of past events that have shaped the present situation.

Rupert Thomson’s Death of a Murderer is one of those books that covers a short span of actual time, but a lifetime of memories. The main character is a policeman whose nightshift duty is to sit guard over the corpse of a notorious murderer whose body will be transferred the next day. At first he has nothing but objective disgust for the criminal and her unspeakable crimes, but as the night wears on, his mind recalls instances of his own violent nature. He comes to a new place in his thinking about himself, his wife, and their daughter.

I liked the interesting characters and complex relationships in The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud. The allusion to the tale of the emperor’s clothes made me look for who in the novel was blind to the truth. Was it the “emperor” or was it the younger generation? I don’t think I really figured it out, and, my bottom line is: I don’t like a book I don’t “get.”

I definitely “got” Jodi Picoult’s Nine-teen Minutes. Having read a number of her other books, I should have known better. It is, indeed, another in her series of a parent’s worst nightmares. We watch the anguish of parents as their children commit or react to a horrific crime. And, of course, pushed right in our face is the question of the extent to which we are responsible for the things our children do. It’s a page turner, but I felt as though I was being jerked around emotionally.

I have been loving the library and priding myself on the fact that I have not succumbed to the siren call of the bookstore all summer. Then, the other day, one of my daughters was over and, looking around, remarked in a tone somewhere between incredulity and despair, “Mom, you’ve got library books all over the place.” Oh, no! Well, at least this addiction is free.