When I was in the Washington DC airport, I shopped for a novel that I planned to read when I went down to Bloomington for a few days over spring break. I was talking to a friend at the time, and the choice came down to One Hundred Years of Solitude (loudly announced as such from a sticker on the front) and something else. My friend recommended 100YoS, and I bought it. However, I didn't want to appear possibly as someone who may have bought the book because Oprah had recommended it*, so I removed the sticker from the front. Then, I didn't want to feel like the kind of person who was so intellectual-status-insecure that I would remove the sticker from the front of an Oprah book so it wouldn't look like my book choices were influenced by Oprah, so I put the sticker on the inside cover of the book so I could scan it and blog about it later (i.e., now), which allowed me to then reap the appearance benefits of reading the book sans sticker while avoiding the psychological costs of feeling like I was taking myself too seriously. And, then, when I went to Bloomington, I ended up reading maybe 80 pages of 100YoS and devoting the rest of my reading time to swallowing whole this science-fiction-political-satire-novel (The X President) that I bought on a whim at the Bloomington Borders.
* Of course, that Oprah had recommended it was the only reason it was an available option among the small selection of books in the kiosk-ish airport store where I bought it.
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