Book ends
I have always been amazed by people who don’t love books. People who can’t have them around.
The OmegaFamily has too many books, frankly. We have books in heaps and piles all over the house, though most of the books live in the office or in a bookshelf near the TV. When we were figuring out our net worth for our adoption from China, in a fit of true anal-ness, I counted our books.
We had about three thousand.
(I then multiplied the paperback books by one multiplier and the hardback books by another, totalled them all up, and stuck them on my little spreadsheet. I was so darned proud of that spreadsheet! And then our dossier consultant called from the agency, and she wiffled and waffled, and finally said, “We’re not sure you have enough net worth.” What?! I had scooched that number up towards $100,000! When I explained what I had done, there was a small silence on the other end of the phone, and she finally said, somewhat weakly, “Well, we normally just tell our people to estimate. Why don’t you use what your insurance agent uses?” Bah. So we did that, instead, and the agency was happy.)
I met a man while I was on a visit back to Chicago once who was a very odd duck. We clicked extremely fast, and I ended up going out with him a time or two. We finally ended up back at his apartment, and I was amazed at how sterile it seemed…then I realized that he had one bookshelf. One. Filled with pristine books. He informed me that he collected first editions…then he told me he had read none of them.
This was a deal killer for me.
(When I returned back to the southwest, he sent me a book titled “On the Way to the Wedding”. Obviously, there was a serious miscommunication going on there. I found it very creepy, actually.)
My grandmother–well on her way to 104 now, but not looking too likely to make it to the year mark–has an odd relationship with books. She loves to read. But, to her, books are a disposable item. You get them from the bookstore or the library, and when you’re done reading them, you get rid of them. All they are, in her eyes, is something to collect dust. She doesn’t have the tendency that other people in my family have, of wandering through her (personal) library, finger trailing across book spines, finding an old favorite, pulling it out, leafing through a few pages, and deciding, “Ah! I’ll read this one again.” To her, reading a book “again” is a very odd concept. And paperback books? Ach. Truly throwaway items. She regularly made cracks about my parents’ house filled with paperback books.
What brings this all about is a quote: “Oh, my parents never cracked a book, just newspapers,” he told the Christian Science Monitor. “But they had lots of books. They bought them at the Salvation Army to fill up empty shelves.” Which brings to mind the question: why have bookshelves at all, if you’re not going to read the books you buy to fill them??
The “he” in question is Lloyd Alexander, author of 40 young adult fantasies. I loved the “The Chronicles of Prydain
Lloyd Alexander died this week of cancer.
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