The co-op I shop at has kept a battered wooden cart of secondhand paperbacks by the entrance for as long as I’ve lived here, a dollar each, no system to it, whatever a member happened to donate that week sitting next to whatever’s been sitting there unclaimed for months. I check it every single time I go in, even on weeks I’m only there for milk and don’t intend to buy a single book, and I’ve stopped pretending to myself that this is casual. It’s a genuine ritual at this point, and I’d guess close to a third of what I’ve read in the last two years started as a dollar find in that specific cart.

We Have Never Been Modern came out of there, water damaged along the bottom edge in a way that still smells faintly of something the first time I open it. So did a copy of The Extended Phenotype with someone else’s pencil underlining running through the first four chapters and then abruptly stopping, like whoever owned it before me hit the same technical wall I eventually hit and gave up around the same point. I like that kind of evidence of a previous reader more than I probably should, the idea that a book has already had one whole relationship with somebody before it gets to me, and the cart is full of exactly that kind of secondhand residue in a way a new copy never carries.

Ted thinks I’m one good find away from being unable to walk past any cart of used books anywhere, which is possibly true, I have definitely bought books at that cart I had no immediate plan to read and some I still haven’t gotten to eighteen months later. But there’s something about the total randomness of it, no algorithm recommending anything, no curated shelf, just whatever a stranger decided they were done with, that’s led me to books I’m fairly sure I never would have picked up any other way. I don’t know what’s going to be in there this week. That not knowing is most of the appeal.