It’s graduation and moving season here in the Annex, which means people are culling their book collections. And, for those of us who cannot walk past even a soggy cardboard box if it contains the promise of a single book in it, this is a both a blessing and a curse (if it wasn’t for this strange compunction, how—for example—would I ever have come across Growing up Degrassi?). This late spring/early summer cornucopia means terrific finds, but also swelling bookshelves (of course, we could do our own slimming of the hordes, but who are we kidding?)

A few weeks ago the greatest find thus far occurred in the foyer of the building I live in. In a stack of maybe thirty books, which I spent a good fifteen minutes carefully going through, I took upstairs, in a rush of sheepish, bookish joy:

The Divine Comedy Volume 1

The Odyssey

Lyistrata

Prometheus Bound

Medea

Selected Canterbury Tales

Hamlet

The Crucible

Endgame

and The Dragons of Eden, by Carl Sagan

(list organized in no particular order)

What can be deduced about the person who disposed of these books? She obviously took some classes in the classics and drama, and probably enjoys reading sci-fi in her spare time. Anything else would be conjecture, pure and simple. Two things are for certain: I’m going to be reading a fair amount of Greek tragedy this summer, and from now on, whenever I pass somebody in the hall or the stairwell or griping about the failure of the drier to yet again actually dry clothes, I will now wonder: is it you? Are you the one that irrevocably changed the track and shape of my immediate reading plans?

Is it you?

Is it?