some people buy drugs..
Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 10:48AM I have a terrrible problem.
I think it may have gotten out of hand.
I try to be good, I try to go to the library instead of the thrift store. The thrift store is an evil place. Every time I'm in town it calls to me from over there in its dingy shopping center. "We have new books...." it sings, so gently, so very sweetly.
It's like...it's like...it's like it's like I'm a drug addict and the thrift store has the good stuff for cheap. My son told me this week that he'd "rather just buy the books than go to the library, because then there's not a time limit on reading them."
Oh, children, why must you tempt me so?
Here is one of my bookshelves:
Here is another:
I ask you, does a woman with this many books (and this is only two of my shelves) need more?
Evenings when Father Bird is gone and I've put the children to bed, I stand in front of these shelves and run my finger down the rows of spines. Which one will I take down off the shelf? Which voice will I take up to my bed with me, curl up around, and listen while it sings me to sleep?
Every time I'm coming home from the thrift store with another armload of books I wonder at myself. Why do we still need books in the age of the internet? Why not go to the library after all, where the books you want are in tidy rows on the shelf and in the card catalog? Why the thrift store, where there may be nothing at all you'd like to take home?
Because the internet, and the library, say to us, "What do you want?" and give us a blinking cursor. Books, and the thrift store, say, "Here's something you may not have thought of..." and open a little gift they've thought of just for us. Sort of like the different approaches Father Bird and I have to our own birthdays. He wants to tell me what he wants and send me a link to the Amazon page to purchase it. I don't want to tell him what I want, I want him to use what he knows of me to choose something he thinks I'd like, because he was thinking of me. He's a library type. An internet type. I...well, you see...
Admitting you have a problem, that's the first step to...something. That's the only step I can remember, anyway.
I feel a lot better.
~MB~
Reader Comments (9)
Oh but you have so many good and wonderful titles there!! I'm like you, I really can't resist a good thrift store with books! especially for the kids to read :) and you when you wind down for the evening. hope all is well!
No, no. It's better to own the book. Always better to own the book. Then the library doesn't call you and say "hey, uh, can you bring our book back?" and you don't have to reply "well, I'd love to, but I live 2,000 miles away now and it's not worthwhile for me to mail it to you." Or in my mother's case "no, no you can't. I'm the only one who checked it out in the last year, so I've decided to keep it and read it all I want. Nyah." (I'm not sure she added the "nyah" but she did tell the library she was keeping it and there was no talking her out of it. She loves that book. (It's a collection of Jane Austen's novels - all of them - in one giant hardcover.)
Books are more important than .... oh .... anything I can think of right now and if you can still walk round your house without climbing over them in piles - you have not yet got too many! Try this ... make a pile - ok - a lot of piles - of all the books you could do without and Give Them Away to make room for more new exciting books - you'll be very popular.
I suffer from the same problem. Before Shane and I were married his boss at the time had 3 crates of boxes---all FULL of books (I have no idea how he acquired them) and he was going to throw them away. I was APALLED.
You mean to tell me I got the Watson girl that owns 2 books and there was another one out there with my same addiction?! We should compare libraries...like squealing 12-year-old girls.
No, no, Adam, there was only one Watson girl out there when you came along. Alas, for you and me, it was not to be. (Cue "There's a Place for Us")
Besides. Two of us in the same house? You see how insane that could become, don't you?
True, true. The proportion of books to necessities would be terribly skewed. Though, around here it's clothes to necessities...<sigh>.
Ah, now, see, we wear rags, but we have GOOD LITERATURE!
but alas if you did not, our dinner conversation would be very different! (remember me telling you Danny says out of the blue, so she needs to write a book! and I agreed you are well-read and quite eloquent!) so you can't change:)