Read - Day 3

I'm taking an online class to help me with my writing. Every morning I get an email prompt about the topic for the day and I write what I can/want, with the intent to go deeper than just the basics and to capture the details of my life. You can learn more about the class here: 31 Days For the fun of it, I'm posting on my blog what I wrote for the previous day's assignment.

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I LOVE to read! I LOVE books! I LOVE buying books! I LOVE being surrounded by books! I love the crack sound when I open a new book. I love putting my face in a new book and smelling that new-book-smell. Doug tells me I have wood pulp in my veins.

I'm not sure when or how my love of reading developed. I remember living at Westover A.F.B. in Massachusetts, and Mom loading all of us (5 kids) into the station wagon and taking us to the Base library. We would spend a lot of time there, it seems, and Mom would let each of us check out lots of books. The number '10' stand out in my mind (10 books x 5 kids!). It was there that I won the reading contest one summer. My prize was the book Thimble Summer, which I still have. I don't think many libraries give books as rewards any more.

I wonder now if those frequent trips to the library were one of my Mom's coping mechanisms for when my pilot-Dad was gone so much. Mom's solution to that frequent single-parenting? Get tons of books to keep us entertained, and it worked!

I find that I don't pick up an actual book and get lost in it as much as I used to. Electronic media makes bits and pieces of superfluous reading too easy to do. I've become more aware of that and I'm creating more time for book reading.

One of the things I'm very grateful for is that my kids also enjoy reading books. We did a lot of reading aloud as they were growing up, which I miss doing. It was time well spent because it is nice to see that my grown children are still readers.

Right now we have a lot of our books in the garage, in shelves and containers. When we put the new carpet in last December everything in the house was moved into the garage. We had 10 tall bookcases in the house and have only brought in four. Once we finish reorganizing all the rooms we'll have a few more bookcases back in the house. But this is also the time of the great home school purge and I'm letting go of a LOT of books. Yikes! This has been a somewhat painful experience for me, but it's necessary. I'm only keeping the most loved and necessary books.

So for now we also have a library out in the garage!

There are so many books I want to read. There are many books I feel like I should read because they will change who I am and how I view life. I'm beginning to see some value in electronic books, especially when I travel. That is changing what's in my carry-on bag forever! But I think my first choice will always be to hold a book in my hands and hear the crack of the binding when I open the book and smell that wonderful book-smell.