Mile High Books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
- Arnold Lobel
While it is generally not in my nature to grow a beard I love this quote. My daughter and I love to shop for books. Mind you, we do enjoy the big highbrow bookstores with the piped in music and the Starbucks tucked in the corner but that is not really what we call shopping for books. To really shop for a book one must go to an obscure, out of the way, seller of used books and other absurdities type store. This is where the real shopping for books begins. You are welcomed with stacks and rows and piles of books, many with worn covers, dog earred pages (why, oh why, do people do this?), underlinings ( I love when I find notes in the margins), some still bearing boarding passes, others have been given as gifts at one time and have personal notes written with to and from info.
On my recent trip around the world- ok, just around the north parts of America, Jenn and I had many occasions to shop for books. Some hunt snipe, we prefer the patient hunt for these treasures small enough to fit in your hand and yet large enough to show you the world and then some. And we found books- lots of them. I am guessing that between the two of us in the past two months of travel we have purchased over 40 used books. Jenn is a voracious reader and is often found with a "heavy classic" in her hands or some dystopia or a sci fi. I envy her because she can remember most everything she reads. Me, on the other hand, I might be better off with only 10 or 12 books because after I read one I forget what it said- reading it again is almost like the first time. I dare not begin to count the numbers of books that we have in this house. I will say this though, last week when she was home we sorted through 6 big boxes of books that had been leftovers from high school garage sales- we rescued a few for our pleasures then I gingerly carried these books off to a Goodwill for someone else to patiently hunt down and treasure or at least pile a mile high in their bedrooms like I do.
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