I’ve said it before. I have a whole page dedicated to it (that I’ve sorely neglected.) You walk in my house and you wouldn’t have thought anything else.
I am a bibliophile. It almost sounds dirty. (And for the record, The Boy is WAY worse than I am. But that’s a different post.)
My parents very thoughtfully presented The Boy with a gift certificate to Barnes & Noble for his birthday. Of course, any excuse to go peruse the bookstore and not have to spend one’s own money is damn near cause for a party. So, off we went to B&N this weekend to take a gander and see what there was to be seen.
My love of books is deep seated in my raising. I recall seeing my mother with a book in her hands more often than not (and having to call her name repeatedly to get her attention…not for anything urgent, but if I wanted to ask her a random question.) We went to the library a lot when I was little (evidently I (and my brother) were often satisfied with a “We’ll look it up at the library,” when it came to our incessant whys) and when I got in trouble, my punishment usually had something to do with books (I remember once where I couldn’t get a new book for a month…it was torture.) The latter half of my elementary school years were spent participating in my school district’s Battle of the Books (I was generally the one one on my team who had read all the books on the list…I think one year even the advising teacher hadn’t read them all.)
Yesterday when we went to the bookstore, I decided to take a look at the “Summer Reading/Required Reading” tables to see what they are having kids read today. One of the first books I saw was The Cricket in Times Square. All of a sudden, all I could do was remember all the great books I’d read when I was in grade school. As I looked over the tables, many of them popped out at me…Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. There were a lot of great books in my past.
Seeing all those books just made me think of what kind of library I would like any future children to have. Makes me wish I’d kept all my favorites…
