225. Books

It seems too obvious to me to say this, but I love books. I have a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in English because I love books. I have always loved books from the earliest memories of childhood. I remember children’s books from the late fifties and early sixties with their minimalist color drawings—the kid in Michigan who could never keep from losing one of his red mittens, the little tug boat, the farmer that kept picking up animals in his dump truck. These stories were mostly printed in grays with some red or yellow thrown in. And really? A Michigan winter would be mostly gray with the bright colors of red mittens, wouldn’t it?

As I grew older I went through a spell of not caring so much whether I read or not, so I got stuck on the kids books for awhile because of my little brothers. I remember reading to them once in a while. Dr. Seuss. The Monster at the End of This Book. And then someone directed me toward the Hardy Boys books. I read them like crazy. That meant I had to go to the library. I fell in love with our school library by the time I was in Junior High. Mrs. Clark would lead me to certain books and I would pull them off the shelves and just sit on the shelving stools looking through books until I found the right one and then I would go check it out before going back to class. When I wasn’t looking for a book I would go sit in the library and read during lunch or find a buddy to play chess or checkers with. I just wanted to be in the library surrounded by books, feeling as if their knowledge and adventure would somehow seep into me even if I weren’t reading them. It’s true that I wasn’t such a book nerd that I would take the library over the sunshine, but I got to the point of always having a book in tow. I’m still that way—a book or a magazine.

When it was time to go to college I had a vague notion that I wanted to be a teacher but I didn’t know what to major in. I probably would have majored in library sciences if I even knew what that was, but at that time I did not. I finally settled on English because it meant I could be around books. I took too many English classes at a time and found myself sometimes overwhelmed with books. I learned to read quickly, to skim, and to summarize because I couldn’t possibly read more than one book a day while going to classes, writing papers and working part time. Still, I bought all those novels and anthologies that I still reread and peruse to this day. I have, in fact, amassed a significant library of my own (though I have recently been weeding out books I know I won’t re-read and books I know I’ll never read, because I need space for the new books I’m going to be purchasing.

Something I often do, and missed terribly when my kids were small, is go to bookstores and just look at what’s available. I force myself to not buy more than one for myself, if I buy any at all. I will roam around looking at books—novels, psychology, history, poetry, philosophy, religion, and favorite authors—and find one or two and sit in a chair or just stand with it and read parts of it. If I like it well enough to not be able to put it back on the shelf I’ll buy it. If I can’t decide it means a hard no because I can always get it at the library and read it without adding it to my stacks. But the feel of a book in my hands, the smell of either new or old, perhaps cigarette smoke-stale books seem to send me off into a world I’ve never inhabited before even if I’d read the book before because I have changed.

I love everything about books, that’s really all there is to it.