Confessions of a binge reader:

me that my books had come in and were ready for pickup. I loved going to get them and finding them bound together with a rubber band and marked with my initials. I would sometimes giggle when I placed a stack of 10 books on the scanner and it somehow correctly checked out all the right titles.

I only bought one book, in a moment of weakness over Labor Day weekend when I realized the library was going to be closed for four days and I hadn’t ordered the next few books in time.

After that, I ordered them five or 10 at a time at the library.

It turns out I’m not the only one who loves the library. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans visited the library more frequently than the movie theater in 2019.

I AM NOT A COP, BUT I FELT LIKE I STARTED THINKING LIKE ONE

When you spend hours a day reading police procedurals, you start thinking like a cop, or at least how I imagine a cop thinks. I began paying more attention to details.

Looking at people on the subway, I would think about how I would describe them if I were called as a witness — their dimensions, physical attributes, clothing, tendencies — and then test myself when I got home to see if I remembered.

I’d pay attention to license plates of passing cars, though I never was able to remember those.

FICTION IS NOT REALITY

Over the summer, a homeless man killed four people as they slept on the streets of New York City. Telling my partner about it, I started describing what would happen if this was Eve’s case.

“I think you have a problem,” he replied.

There was a particularly meta moment when I was reading a book that featured characters going to the Oscars because a movie about one of Eve’s cases was nominated. Later that evening, I tuned into the Golden Globes and couldn’t help but make comparisons between fiction and reality. If only “The Icove Agenda” (from Robb’s “Origin in Death”) won instead of “1917”…

Now that I’m caught up, I can’t say I’m looking for another series to dive into. I did immediately binge “The Morning Show” because I had been neglecting my TV shows. But reading these books gave me what I wanted and needed. Just like a vacation, the series gave me a break from reality, and taught me how much I need that.