Buried Under Books

Books. I can never get enough of them.

I have them piled on my night table and on a small table between my desk and the couch. I have a tote bag full-to-bursting with library books. More books are double- and even triple-parked in my living-room bookcases (where I have them stacked horizontally because I can get more books per square inch onto the shelves.) There is a small bookshelf in the master bedroom with no space for anything my husband might want to read. I’ve even got shelves full of my old college texts, lurking in the basement because there’s no room for them anywhere else, but I can’t bear to part with them. What self-respecting English major gets rid of her copies of Beowulf and Shakespeare?

As to my cookbook collection, which numbers over 100 volumes, it has outgrown the tall bookshelf I put in the kitchen corner last year, and expanded to the dining room where the oversized and antique cookbooks have found a home. My husband thinks I have too many cookbooks. He likes what I cook, though, so he doesn’t complain about them, or the square footage they occupy, very often.

Both of my sons seem to be heading down the same path. My first-grader scatters “Magic Tree House” books in his wake, devouring them as fast as I can get them from the library. My high-schooler leaves larger, heavier volumes around the house, usually of the sci-fi/fantasy variety. He will finish a book and then turn right around and open it from the beginning again, to get what he missed the first time around.

And I’m happy that their sister has finally started reading for pleasure. She’s been my most reluctant reader, and never did get into all the wonderful books that I loved as a child. But finally, this summer, something clicked and she began seeking out books that were not required as part of a school assignment. They weren’t my old favorites, but I did read some of them along with her, and I tried to appreciate that she enjoyed them—even while I didn’t.

In my dream house, I have a room with a tall window on one wall. The other walls are completely lined with bookshelves. There are enough bookshelves that my books don’t have to be stacked two or three deep, and that I can actually organize the fiction books by author and the nonfiction books by topic. There would be a window seat, and a teapot.

But it’s probably a good thing that I don’t live in my dream house, because if I had a room like that, I might never leave it.