For someone as perpetually busy as I am, a weekend with no plans is both soothing and disorienting. I’m constantly torn between the need to relax and the urge to fill my time. I need the downtime, my shivering soul protests, but my brain won’t stop buzzing. Everywhere I look there is, of course, something to be done, a project half-finished looking at me reproachfully, dust bunnies prowling under the bed.<\/p>\n
The bathroom needs scrubbing and I dutifully swab the decks but my heart’s not in it. Laundry goes in, yet another load in the endless cycle. I close my eyes to all the feelers reaching for me, the to-do lists in my brain that flutter down and wrap my mind in sticky gauze and I pick up an old beloved book and read for an hour instead. <\/p>\n
While my family was gone I went through my library list and looked at every book on every shelf (except the kid’s books in their rooms…those are still to be done). I am the only person I know who keeps an inventory of my books. Lists make me happy and lists of books bring that happiness to a peak. I did the list 11 years ago, before we moved to Sweden, because the moving company insisted on a written inventory of EVERY SINGLE ITEM we owned for insurance purposes. <\/p>\n
We had more than 2000 books then. We have more now. I say we, but I mean I<\/b>. I have more now. Every time I buy a book I add it to the list. Okay, I confess, it’s actually an Excel spreadsheet. I read so much and so fast that I can no longer remember every book I have or have read and must keep track so that I’m not constantly buying duplicates.<\/p>\n
I can remember my first bookshelf. It was a little brown cabinet that my mom gave me. I think it held records before I inherited it. It was short and squat and dark brown with 2 doors and 2 really deep shelves. I filled it with books and I knew every one. A Wrinkle in Time, Turi’s Poppa, Mandy, The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, The Little Broomstick, Lad: A Dog, Little Women, Heidi, James and the Giant Peach, Nancy Drew<\/i>, all those lovely-smelling hardcovers with birthday and christmas notes written in the flyleafs, in my parents’ handwriting, or my grandparents’. <\/p>\n
Later, when I was old enough to be spending my own allowance, I invariably spent it on books and I began adding paperbacks. I read them over and over and over. Some books I own have been read so many times that the titles on the spines are all but unreadable from being cracked in every possible place.<\/p>\n
I don’t keep every book I read, of course. If I did, the house would have been reduced to small pathways between towering piles of paperbacks long ago; the kids trapped in their rooms, the only available seating a reading chair with good light. Each time I finish a book now, it is kept or discarded on the basic criteria of the answer to the question: did I like it enough to read it again? If the answer is no, it goes in the bag for the annual AWC media sale. If the answer is yes, I must make space on the already over-crowded shelves, which have now begun to be two rows deep in places, despite my real strictness with myself and my periodic sweeps of purging.<\/p>\n
I don’t get panicky about many things but the idea that I might not get around to reading all the books I want to read makes my chest tighten. All the books on my list, all the books I haven’t discovered yet, all the books my favorite authors have yet to write. And all the ones I loved and want to immerse myself in and visit with again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For someone as perpetually busy as I am, a weekend with no plans is both soothing and disorienting. I’m constantly torn between the need to relax and the urge to fill my time. I need the downtime, my shivering soul protests, but my brain won’t stop buzzing. Everywhere I look there is, of course, something to be done, a project half-finished looking at me reproachfully, dust bunnies prowling under the bed. The bathroom needs scrubbing and I dutifully swab the decks but my heart’s not in it. Laundry goes in, yet another load in the endless cycle. I close my...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-bibliophilia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4879,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions\/4879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}