It was the dead of winter and something about the yogurt splashed on my living room walls was depressing me, so I decided to take my two boys, Hell on Wheels and The Destroyer, out for a drag around the mall. We hadn’t been shopping since before Christmas and I was pretty sure the restraining order had run out, so the day had potential.

As luck would have it, we were scarcely in the mall (meaning, the boys had only been ejected from one store) when I happened upon a book sale.

Being an obsessed bibliophile, I pulled my boys away from the mannequin they were undressing and dragged them to the rows of tables piled high with books bound for the bin …