Books: Buy, Borrow or Banish?
This week is Children’s Book Week - at least the fall version as it happens again in the spring. 🤷🏻♀️ So in honor of that, I thought I’d take a minute to wax on about my own conflicted love affair with books. I unequivocally love stories but my current relationship with books is a little more complicated.
I don’t remember not loving books. It may not have passed genetically from my mom to me but it was certainly modeled pretty much daily. My mom was always reading, even when there were plenty of other things she should have been doing — like making our dinner, just as a for instance. So it was no surprise I was an avid reader as a child, although I don’t recall owning very many books. The summer library reading challenges were my jam and my card was stamped to borrow thirteen books at once by the time I was ten thanks to my dogged completion of every challenge before the end of June - I mean, really, who needs the whole summer to read 15 books. I wish I still had those logs since the titles have long since faded from memory. Harriet the Spy was a classic (and on brand), and I remember mysteries taking center stage for a long while - Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and then Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. I was also a bit of an Anglophile and loved historical fiction, especially in a royal setting. So no surprise that I’ve binge watched The Crown, Downton Abbey, and Bridgerton.
My mom collected hardbacks of certain authors: Ludlum, Grafton, Evanovich and Binchy come to mind and she had an entire wall of books to keep her company during the long north woods winters. Brian and I also seem to have books in most rooms in our house and, while it’s not an immediate problem, I know that many, if not most of these books will have to go, as we contemplate downsizing at some future date. I got myself a Kindle for the express reason of cutting down on clutter. It has other advantages to be sure, but that was my primary incentive. I confess that I love the convenience and the ease of carrying multiple books with me, but there is something about holding a real book in your hand that I miss. I have culled through what I consider MY books and whittled that collection down to four 24” shelves - which is still too many by at least half. And I’ve put Brian on notice that when the time comes, every other book in the house is his problem. I’ve only seen him cry about four times in 34 years of marriage but book banishment day is going to be number five for sure. Like Brian, my friend Tracy is having trouble letting go. She’s moving after the holidays and I am helping her divest herself of a vast and varied book collection. We spent maybe twenty minutes pulling books from ONE bookcase last week and, as I dropped them into the Better World Books Box, I counted 150 books. It’s worth noting that the shelves on which they had sat, really didn’t look all that different. A mere drop in the book bucket. (And of course another 20 are now stacked next to my bed - but they will be donated after I read them!)
But although I can be ruthless in separating adults from their beloved bindings, I’m a bit of a hypocrite in that the Conor Levey Collection of Children’s Books still fills a large bookcase waiting for round two of happy little lap sitters to entertain. I’ve gotten rid of a few clunkers here and there but Conor loved even some that I found poorly written, so on the shelf they sit. I just think kids need real books and I dread the day that littles start reading books on Kindles or whatever the next gen distribution model looks like. There’s just something about the page turn in a kids book. By the second or third read through, they know what’s coming and that anticipation and excitement to get to the next page can’t be replicated by a simple tap on the screen. So many of my happiest moments as a mom were spent reading to Conor on his bed, outside on a picnic blanket, in the car, and even on the floor of the bathroom when I’d made the tactical error of designating a set of Disney books as potty training books that could only be read when he was on the toilet. I should have been much more specific about the “requirements.” Anyway…..
I personally borrow more books than I buy for myself, especially of late, but over the years I have given lots and lots of books as gifts to children so I am guilty of adding to the accumulations in many other households. I think my Mom gave Conor a new book almost every time she saw him. She loved silly most of all and Philadelphia Chickens and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie were certainly fan favorites. (FYI, the former includes a CD that is not terribly objectionable - which is high praise in the world of music written expressly for children). I don’t know how many it added up to but it was well into double digits in the the nine short years they had together. I’m also a huge fan of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library that sends a book a month to children from birth to age 5. That’s 60 books for any child who is signed up day one. What an amazing gift that is to a child! New parents have to register for a social security number but they should also register for the Imagination Library before they even leave the hospital!
It’s fitting that National Children’s book week falls during a month where I am revisiting my works in progress and falling back in love with the process of creating stories for children. To celebrate that, I’ve made the ebook version of my children’s chapter book, Ready, Regan?, FREE from November 11 -14 and dropped the price on the paperback to $5 for the rest of the month. (You may be wondering why I even offer an ebook version since I don't love the idea of kids reading digitally. We created that mostly as a way to allow people to check it out for free occasionally and then, hopefully, buy the paperback. And, of course, I’d rather they read it digitally than not at all!)
I’d love to hear about your book collections in the comments. Do you keep books to reread or do you just like having your old favorites on the shelf? Are they specific genres, authors, or simply your own curated collection of books that touched your heart, mind, and spirit?