25 more things about me and books

1. Sometimes I tell people that we have a book problem at our house, but I don’t really mean it.
2. We have ten bookcases in our house, the five-shelf tall ones.
3. Two of them are double shelved, where you have a stacks of small paperbacks pushed to the back, with another row of bigger books, trade paperbacks and hardbacks, shelved in front of them.
4. One of the first thing people ask me when they come to our house is if we’ve read all those books.
5. Whenever I’m asked this, I always think how cool it would’ve been to live back when you had to cut the pages of your books as you turned them.
6. But then it would’ve been awfully easy to tell how many books you never read or finished.
7. I’ve read all or parts of most of my books.
8. Well, a whole bunch of them, anyway.
9. Really.
10. The books I tend not to read are ones I buy at the $1.00 an inch Friends of the Library fundraisers. Stack up your books, they measure them with a yard stick, and you pay less for ten books than for one.
11. So then I buy stuff I think I should read, like Atonement by Ian McEwan. Or something by Joyce Carol Oats. And I never read them.
12. I don’t think their original owners read them either. They’re generally in remarkably good shape.
13. But I still can’t make myself get rid of them. I’m like Laura whenever I ask her to go through her stuffed animals before Christmas to give some to charity and clear out some space in her room. She’ll pick out four tiny animals, and sometimes they belong to her brother.
14. I remember every single person I loaned a book to who didn’t return it. Not fondly.
15. I like to listen to audio books in the car, but only if it’s something I’ve already read. I need to see the words on the page first.
16. I still love the books I read growing up, like Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series and Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles.
17. Laura is named after Laura Ingalls Wilder. And Caroline was Ma’s name.
18. Unfortunately, Laura has never been interested in reading Little House on the Prairie.
19. Having Will was the way I found one of my favorite children’s books, Kevin Henkes’ Julius, The Baby of the World, the most wonderful story about sibling rivalry ever.
20. I pretend to be a snob about what I read, but I have a whole file cabinet drawer full of Stephen King novels in my attic.
21. I am woefully American in my reading habits. I confess that I have never read a Russian novel.
22. But I am actually still fairly well read, if Anglocentric. I faithfully read all the British and American novels required for my comprehensive exams, without resorting to Masterplots like some of my friends.
23. Well, except for Ulysses.
24. One of my favorite Christmas presents was a little house paperweight that reads all around its base, “A house without books is like a room without windows.”
25. One of my favorite quotes is from Isak Dineson’s Out of Africa, “I have been a mental traveler” (or wait! was that just in the film?). I can’t afford real travel and all these books.