a love of books

I've noticed lately that my girls are not reading.  too much time with the little boxed screen and too little time in the words of some one's imagination.  I need to remedy this.

We were always reading growing up.  If you walked into the house you would find us all in a spot somewhere with a book, sitting over the heater vents or in front of the fireplace or wood stove were favorite spots.  We grew up in an old house and it was typically very cold upstairs. I remember being so lost in a book in front of the fireplace that when my mother walked in and  spoke to me it was like coming back through a portal to the present time and place.

The very first books I remember were the little golden books.  The Pokey Little Puppy, The Tawny Scrawny Lion.  From there I remember The Little House books, the Trixie Belden series. then stand alones that remain favorites, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Merry, Rose and Christmas-Tree June led to a love of Edward Gorey's image.  Behind The Attic Wall both thrilled and scared me, Little Women, The Secret Garden, oh my.  As I became a teenager, I terrified myself with Stephen King novels, many sleepless nights, but oh that writing, and my mother tucked a paperback collection of Christmas romances in my stocking.  In fact on Christmas, we each had a small stack of gifts under the tree each wrapped in our own individual papers, more often than not, mine were books.

Now I read a wide variety of books.  I still have my favorite collections that I revisit every few years, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Harry Potter series.   I began my first mystery series by Louise Penny thanks to the encouragement of my mother and aunt, thank you, I can't believe it took me so long.  I love wholesome little village tales of hope and promise, thank you to the towns of Mitford and Harmony.  I duck into the library and sneak out Amish romance novels and try to forget that there cannot be THAT many widows and widowers in these small communities.  I love reading stories of getting away from life, and journals and memoirs and stories about cats, May Sarton writes with beautiful honesty about all those things rolled up in one.  I love reading about nature and the way miracles happen everyday, thank you David Kline and Bernd Heinrich.  I thumb through cookbooks in bed like they are catalogs. I love to read books by the Christian mystics and Buddhist teachers.

My amazon wish list is 23 pages long and is broken into three separate categories.  I rarely buy books these days, opting towards the library or used booksellers.  I never read fiction on my kindle and most of the time it's battery is dead.  I love the weight of a book in my hand, the smell of a book.  I miss the old check-out cards in the back of the library books.  Before I even started the first page I would go through the card and read the names of the people who read them before me, feeling a common bond with them.  These are my people.

My father has stacks of book collections piled around his house.  My mother fills journals with lists of the books she has read.  My sister, the young adult librarian always has a to-read list a mile long. To us books are life and we need them just as we need shelter and food and clothing.  What a sad, dull world it would be without them.

I have books that are like old friends.  They wait for me on the shelves to pick them back up again, paragraphs are highlighted and marked to bring inspiration or a smile. And they are always there these words, these characters, these homes that welcome and bring me peace.  Most of the books I read remind me that there was a gentler time, a time when people moved at a natural pace and took the time to do quiet things like, cook, bake, sew and read.

We must read more.  A library card is a terrible thing to waste.