There are lots of books in my house.
Most are on shelves, some are in piles, and many others are scattered all around the house, except for in the bathroom. Thankfully, smartphones have made the tacky basket-full-of-books-in-the-bathroom trend obsolete.
The book types vary from spot to spot.
For example, we have board books wherever the baby plays. She likes books so much she eats them.
I usually keep a visually stunning book near the bay window up front to complement our newspapers or magazines. Right now it’s Joel Sartore’s National Geographic Photo Basics, which I’m reading to improve my photography skills.
In my wife Jenny’s quilting room, we keep her business books, cookbooks, and any self-help or religious books.
My office is for books on history, writing, law, fiction, and memoir. It energizes me to have creative energy around me while I work. One shelf is full of old comic books.
My desk has many book piles. The main pile right now is from people who will be speaking at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. Then there are my impulse buys, and a seemingly random pile including a book on Kim Jong Un, the complete collection of Winnie the Pooh, and a history of the church where I was baptised and married.
That pile actually makes sense: those are books I got for Christmas but haven’t yet read.
Another pile is for my used bookstore finds of the moment.
Right now I have a collection of Family Circus comic strips, but I usually go for extremely outdated human interest pieces. The base of this pile is almost always an Andy Rooney book. Right now, it’s Common Nonsense Addressed to the Reading Public, from 2002.
There is no better tribute to Andy Rooney than including him in a list of things found upon your desk. He’s got a pretty good list of his own on page 212 in a column titled A Great Pile of Piles.
My most important pile is in the living room and usually has something from the library, the last book from the top of my to-read pile, and some sort of essay collection I can pick up when I need something quick.
In my bedroom, on my side, are fairy tales and books of whimsy for nights where sleep eludes us. On Jenny’s side, there’s one book.
Jenny always has just one book she’s reading at a time. She can’t understand how I always have so many in play. Frankly, I think she judges me for it.
The truth is that, while I get really excited about reading a new book at the moment, I don’t always see it through. Reading is just too important to be derailed by a lack of momentum from one book.
When Jenny gets excited about a book, she reads it all in one or two sittings. I find it hard to get through a book without getting excited about five more books mentioned in the one I’m reading.
It isn’t clear who our daughter will take after, but one of her favorite activities is taking every book off her shelf, so I’ve got a hunch she’ll be more like me.
I will literally pick up any book. Sometimes it catches me off guard, like when I decided to read the first few pages of The Hunger Games as a joke and ended up reading it all that same day.
Other times, I’ll pre-order something with incredible anticipation and end up not reading it for a year.
And every so often, I feel compelled to pump my brakes to keep from finishing a book I enjoy too quickly. This was a major factor during my comic book years when I had to force myself to stop to appreciate the artwork and craft rather than just zipping through as fast as I could.
This made the experience last longer, which was important before the Internet and limitless entertainment. It did run the risk though, of derailing my progress.
A pang of regret still gnaws at me after forcing myself to stop reading Superman Red Son (a graphic novel where baby Superman lands in Soviet Russia instead of America) only to lose the book and never find out how it ends.
Could U.S. President Lex Luthor really be our only shot at stopping this superhuman Soviet menace? And why is Batman somehow involved?
I’ll probably never know. The whole thing was bananas and now it’s lost to me forever.
Though I last saw the book seven years ago when I was still living in Texas, I still consider it one of my books in progress.
I have a lot of those: on many shelves, and in many piles, in many rooms of my house. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
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