Tuesday, October 9, 2007

because I am seldom houseproud...


...but I love, love, LOVE our new bookshelves! J bought them last night and by the time I got home from rehearsal was already knee-deep in cardboard, assembling them. I filled them with books and was done around 1am. Finally books can be seen in all their glory at our apartment!
I grew up in a household where books were always proudly displayed, never hidden away because they were "messy" or "didn't match the furniture" or other such twaddle. Over the last 10 years or so I've had an ongoing argument with J about the amount of room books take up in our place, which is too small for clutter. But I always held firm: no books of mine were ever going to live in a storage locker; books are to be enjoyed and always accessible, not squirrelled away. However, we never had enough shelving to make this look good: the books were all here but they were stuffed into such small shelves that they looked horrible and weren't used as often as they should have been. Now, they have pride of place at last. My fiction and music books rest comfortably near J's books on Zen, film-making, symbolism, and what I call the "Manly Arts" section: knifemaking, model shipbuilding, wilderness survival techniques and the like.
I don't consider myself that well-read, even after years of working at bookstores: I love fiction, travel writing, and a few other genres, but I don't range that widely, and I have a terrible habit of reading the same "comfort books" over and over (and over) again instead of trying something new. J, although he doesn't read much, reads very smart stuff when he does. But there is a quote from "To Kill a Mockingbird" that I've always loved: when Scout is having trouble at school because she is already a voracious reader, she says that she's never thought about whether or not she loved to read because: "One does not love breathing."
That's exactly how I feel.

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