Minor Irritant #324

Who-ever had the book I'm currently reading before me was a smoker.

I'm just about to finish The Pale Horseman, part of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories series. It's a fine example of British historical fiction, mining the rich past of the British Islands and their centuries of war and conquest. I'm quite enjoying it.

I'm a dedicated patron of the Lewes Public Library. I visit every week or so, peruse the new releases, choose two (judged usually by their cover, to be honest), and take them home for evenings of escapist literature, or grand drama, or modern, post-modern, or whatever, reading.

Sometimes, though, my visits to the worlds in these novels are colored by the smell of stale tobacco. When someone has had a book before me and has smoked his or her way through it, I can tell. It's not on every page, but every once in a while I open to a page that the last reader exhaled a lung-full of used Marlboro onto.

It's kind of a drag.