Bibliomania

My sister Emily says that they have a problem with shoes. We have the same problem to a degree, but a greater problem in our house is books. Despite our best efforts, we have so many books! Every good librarian knows that one needs to "weed" the collection, so this week, I did some of that. When we moved from Mount Vernon, we got rid of at least half of our books, but for every one we get rid of, two (or even three!) seem to take its place. A quick reading just now of the top shelf of the bookcase in our upstairs hallway includes these titles: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 41 Stories by O. Henry, Papa's Daughter, National Geographic's Great Britain, Favorite Christian Poems, Hello, Cosmo! (required reading to be part of the family), Jane Eyre, three of the Ender series, The Metamorphosis, Little Women, Feeding and Improvement of Farm Animals, My Antonia, Agatha Christie: Five Complete Novels, and The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963. Obviously, we're a bunch of pretty eclectic readers. The books we have around here have come to us in several ways.

1. Dad used to send or bring us boxes of books that Northern had weeded from its library and he thoughtfully picked up for us. There are some classics in this group, including the infamous Dam book and Janet's favorite, Here Comes the Bus!

Her ownership of this book is proclaimed this way:

It looks like her name was written by either Emily or me, but she obviously wrote the rest herself.

2. When the kids would bring home flyers from the Scholastic Book Club, they were usually allowed to buy one. When they were in Middle School, they had book fairs in the fall and spring and sometimes the kids bought books there. There are lots of picture books from that era, but also some interesting chapter books, including Dogs Don't Tell Jokes, People Do and A Day No Pigs Would Die.

3. This leads to another category--books people had to read for school. This is a pretty mixed bunch. There are some great books like The Weirdo by Theodore Taylor or The Chosen by Chaim Potok. There are lots of so-called classics that people had to read but would probably never choose to read on their own, like the aforementioned The Metamorphosis, or Their Eyes Were Watching God, or my least favorite of all time, The Lord of the Flies. This category even includes some college textbooks that the bookstore wouldn't buy back, but they're too good or too potentially useful to throw away.

4. Some of us have our own collections of titles. I have most of Georgette Heyer's books and a lot of Ngaio Marsh mysteries. Rene used to have an almost complete collection of Louis L'Amour, but he sold them when we moved. We also have the Twilight series, the Harry Potter series and the series by Scott Westfield that includes the Uglies, the Pretties, etc. That brings up a tangential question. Why do so many popular authors of today write such darn long books?

5. We also have quite a collection of reference books which includes a bunch of Spanish dictionaries and this little gem that Emily used for Power of the Pen:

It is touchingly inscribed "Hi Emily, Good luck at POP. We're Superior", "Hi Emily, Good Luck, Eat Cheesecake factories snake!" and "Good Luck! Sarah Tomita "Haras". I have actually used this book on occasion. We used to have a World Book Encyclopedia and, I swear, the kids would take volumes of it to bed with them as a little pre-slumber reading.

All this does not even take into account our Church books (two bookcases), Rene's work reference library, piano books, maps, family history tomes, and so on. Looks like we won't run out of something to read in the near future!