Excerpt: Author's Market

John pulled a copy of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma from the bargain bin and scowled at the big red discount sticker marring its carefully designed dust jacket, saying, “Don’t they realize that by commoditizing books as though any hard-bound block of pages were the same as every other, they’ve stripped away the value from the ideas contained within even the most worthy, inspiring, or eye-opening tome and left us facing a malnutrition of the mind on par with the malnutrition of the body this very title attempts to address, and for the same sorry reasons?”
“What?” asked Alice, looking up from the book flap of a cookie-cutter political thriller and adding it to her growing armload of bargain-books-to-buy. “Don’t you already have that one, John?”
John returned the book to the bin in between last year’s hot celebrity exposés, shaking his head and saying, “Never mind. I’m going to try to find something worth reading. Find me when you’re ready to go.”