Confessions of a Bookworm

 

 This is going to be more than a bit boring. You have been cautioned.

I have a fine new office chair that my nearest and dearest bought me for a Valentine. He wants chocolate, but the local place that makes it will not have his faves for two weeks. So, one way gift. And at present I am sitting in my chair, contemplating books. 

There is a row of books behind my computer, mostly reference books.

There is a set of bookcases to my left, as I sit at my computer desk, full of books and with a row of more books on top. There is a bookcase behind me, full.

There are four bookcases in the basement, ditto. I also have a Kindle, with a fair load of reading material on it, but if I love a book, or want to refer to again after one read, I want a real copy, with pages that I can turn. And so in some cases I have the book in both locations.

 I guess I should also list the bookcase in the living room, although only half the books in it are mine.
The rest are mostly reference. JG has a smaller case in the bedroom to hold some of his mysteries. The rest are in boxes in his closet. Don’t ask. He has several more – bookcases, that is - in the basement TV and his office room, but some of those are mine and I am actually contemplating tossing a few of the books presently in them. There is a whole shelf of travel books, mostly badly outdated. Sad, but I don’t see much more travel in my future. But … wait, someone might enjoy them, outdated or not. Hmm. What to do.

 I hate to get rid of my books.

 In fact, there are three of my childhood ‘Babar’ books in one of the bookcases, plus an extremely battered copy of A Child’s Garden of Verse. And for some years I had my copies of some of the Anne books, plus my aunt’s copies of some of them, making a complete set. I had had them from the time I was a child, having extracted them from my grandparents’ bookshelf. At some point my aunt found this out and wanted her books back, plus she borrowed mine. I think her son still has them, although, sci fi addict that I knew him as, I seriously doubt he has read them. It did not worry me when my aunt took the hardcovers, as my daughters had a complete set in paperback that I could read if I wanted to. Well, they moved out and their copies went with them and I am seriously contemplating getting myself another set. Well, not too seriously. Maybe just my favourites.

 My non fiction hardcovers run from the top left side of the triple bookcase to about half way, loosely sorted Dewey Decimal style, as that is what I learned as a teen, working in a library. Hard cover fiction, sort of in alpha order where the size of book allows it, take over and complete that wall. The containers with labels hold my collection of material and reference stuff from places I have been, a lot of it from Great Britain and the USA, but some African and a bit local. That is a new sorting job, those labels, a thing I did to keep boredom at bay during one of the pandemic lockdowns. There are still several boxes to add to the collection. And one shelf of photobooks.

 The singleton bookcase also holds a lot of photo albums, all my really tall books and trip diaries and journals. The middle shelf of that case is probably the most curated of anything I own, as all the tall books have to go there.

 Some of the books in the reference bookcase in the living room, and on a couple on the reference shelves in here were my mother’s texts. We gave a lot of her really special books to the University of Windsor, where she was a lecturer in English literature. But I kept a few that I knew were ones she loved, a Chaucer edition and some of Dorothy Sayers’ works come to mind. And I have my father’s Nevil Shute novels. How he loved those stories. I, too, love stories.

 There are a few authors whose stories wind from book to book – Gabaldon, Elizabeth Moon, C J Cherryh, to list a few. You can probably spot Cherryh and Gabaldon in the photo.

Gabaldon has one more book in the series planned, but I am not sure where I am going to put it.

 The thing about the bookshelves being full is that if I want to keep a new book, I have to get rid of an old one. This is really, really seriously hard-breathing difficult. Before I get rid of even a battered paperback, I must reread it to make sure I can do without it. Then it sits balanced on the edge of a shelf for a while. If JG is going to an organization he belongs to where there is a book exchange, I can let the books go there. If I can take them to the book exchange at our local landfill or our local hall, I can let them go. I cannot throw a book away. There are even some of my textbooks on my shelves still.

 No, I don’t write on my books, or mostly I don’t. My complete Shakespeare is pretty scribbled up, but it was a text. Nor do I turn down page corners, except in emergencies, such as being stuck in traffic. Um, yes, I have a book in the car, or my Kindle in my purse pretty well every time I go anywhere. JG and I do a Sudoku at breakfast and then read one or both of the two daily papers we take. We get local weekly papers on Wednesday and Thursday. In between, there are the CTV and CBC apps on my iPad. And books on my iPad, mostly manuals but a few story books in case of emergencies. And emergency being a pause in activity where I really, really need to lose myself in a story.

 Stories are my vice, my catnip, my addiction. I reread the really good ones I know about. I tell myself bits of them or work out added strands of them to put myself to sleep at night or comfort myself in 2:00 am wakefulness. I see nature and probably people in terms of things I recall from stories. (That’s a landscape from L M Montgomery. That seems to be a lot like the mess the protagonist got into in Advise and Consent.) There is a lot of modern fiction I have closed the covers on quickly because there is no story line. But I also read non-fiction, maybe one for every two story books. Non-fiction can be engrossing if it teaches, or illuminates or illustrates. I love At Home by Bill Bryson, for instance. And I guess because it can be made into stories.

 I told you, if you have hung in this far, that this would be boring. I am hardly ever bored myself. If you see me standing in a line or sitting waiting for an appointment, if there is not a book in my hand, you can be certain that there is a story playing out in my head. I love my books, and what they give me.

Edit: For AC. This is what the typed version in Word looked like. Note to other readers - this photo is to illustrated something from the comments - I do not know how to paste a photo into a comment form.