Books! How many times have I thought, “So many books, so little time”? Recently, I heard my friend lament, “Fran, I’m gonna die before I get to read all the books on my saved list at the library!”
I got to looking around the house today and man-oh-man do we have books! They are everywhere. Shelves line the perimeter of one room. A dream to those who love to read and a nightmare to those allergic to dust.
Yoga books, poetry books, books on art and history, classic and modern day novels, cookbooks, plays, books on music theory, linguistics, philosphy, psychology, and health, books on language studies, books in Japanese, French, Italian and Spanish, dictionaries and other reference books, books from my childhood (yes, I have saved those!!)…the list goes on and on.
Long ago I read a book set in Eastern Europe about a man who lives a hum-drum life working for a government agency filing reams and reams of seemingly useless papers and documents into stacks and stacks of shelves. He has been doing this boring job his whole working life. How does he survive? Well, this man has a secret passion for BOOKS and comes to life when he is at home among them. His book collection keeps growing because his hobby is salvaging books. He continuously adds books to his collection until at the end, he can barely GET to his bed because his whole apartment is filled with piles of BOOKS. What a nightmare! Somehow, I can’t recall the title of that book. I am pretty sure I used to own it, but can’t find it for the life of me. I sure hope it isn’t buried here somewhere in/ among the shelves and piles of books in my house!
And to think that I use the library! Honestly, I love the library and I like to think it is one of the best places to benefit by my tax dollars. So how did we end up with so many books?
I guess over the years, it happens. We accumulate books and we get attached. The books become a part of us. There is a preciousness in books, whether they belong to me or are borrowed from the library. Take my cookbooks for example. I can get any recipe on line these days, but I am very attached to my cookbooks. There is nothing like looking at your favorite recipe and noticing the sauce stain on the recipe page. A mark of tried and true! A mark of ownership.
Books, where would we be without them? I leave you with my precious cookbook collection below:
