Amendment

In regards to my previous post about the next generation being doomed and having no imagination, I have an amendment to make.

Saturday I took my mom on a mommy-daughter date. We went out for lunch and then went to Barnes & Noble. Side note: When I was little, mom worked in a children's book store. I've always loved books. The two of us could spend hours in a bookstore and never get tired of it. This is a big thing for me as any other store I hate being in for more than a few moments.

Previous visits to B&N have gone like this (my favorite):

• mom: I'm looking for an autobiography on Benjamin Franklin
• worker: Okay, and who's the author?
• mom: It's an Auto-biography.
• worker: I understand that ma'am. Who is the author?

This is just one example of the "big bad book superstore" industry and their employees not being trained. It could have just been a language barrier (the employee was obviously ESL) when I asked if they had a book by "Christine Burnett" (my recently published cousin) and he put in "Christian Burbet" but I almost cried when the employee didn't know who Walt Whitman was. Who hasn't heard of Uncle Walt?! (Cheater's version: if you don't know, I've linked his picture to the Wikipedia article on him)

That being said, the unknowledgable staff at B&N has not driven me away from saving money and buying books at their reduced prices (most of the time) and as I said earlier, I went on Saturday. My sister had told me about these books she's been reading. All I could remember was that they all had "ink" in the title. I, begrudgingly, went up to the service counter, positive he would have no idea what I was talking about. I asked for "the ink books" and said something about one of them becoming a movie soon (sure that might help jog his memory) and he said "Oh yes, Inkheart." He then proceeded to tell me there were two locations in the youth area where I could find them. Of course he didn't take me to them as that would involve work, but it was a start.
I went to the back wall and found a mother and her son discussing two versions of the book I was looking for. The son was about 13 and had in his hand a red hardback copy of Inkheart. His mother had a blue paperback version of the same.

The mother was trying to get the son to purchase the blue copy as it was $6 cheaper. The son said he wanted the red copy because it didn't give him pictures of the characters and tell him what they need to look like. The boy was fighting for a book to let him use his imagination! I wanted to yell "pay the extra $6!", however the angel on my other shoulder said "but you'd save the money too." In the end I'm not sure what they ended up getting. I found the other display and found out that the red copy was also in paperback and got my mommy to buy it for me. Thanks mom!
All in all it was a great mommy-daughter date. I think we're going to make it a monthly event.