Friday, November 30, 2012

The Comfort of Having Books




I'm having a three table Bridge group here on Monday, so you know what I've been doing this week. Yep--decorating for Christmas and cleaning up this and that, making menus that I change on a daily basis, sorting through recipes and cookbooks. Yes, we serve lunch at this group, but it should be fun as I'll get a chance to use my Christmas dishes for someone other than Ken and me.

For days now, I've walked past a stack of books on top of a speaker. Some are ones I've read and others are in the to-be-read category. But the stack seems to look higher than it did only last week, maybe because I'm more conscious of it now. The shelves next to our fireplace have books on the two bottom shelves that are two rows deep. There are a couple of books on the table between two chairs and another table holds a couple Christmas cookbooks on the bottom shelf.

My office has a bookcase that holds my writing reference books, and one in our bedroom has books I've read and may consider giving to the library book sale when I feel I can part with them. There is a bookcase in our downstairs Family Room that is filled with books I've had for a long, long time. OK, so I'm addicted to being surrounded by books, so it's no wonder that the poster above resonated with me.

When I visit someone whose home has no sign of a book or even a magazine, I am a bit uncomfortable. Part of me wonders where they hide their books. Then another part of me wonders if they have any books or ever read one. A woman in my book club is an avid reader and so is her husband. Their home is literally littered with books. A neatnik would shudder, but I find it comforting to be there among those books.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that I think nearly every writer in the world has rooms filled with books. If they don't, they should!

I suppose, like in most things, one needs to hit a happy medium as far as the quantity of books in a room. My home will always be filled with books and also magazines. How about yours? Do you have a lot of books in sight, or do you hide them away? Or do you not have books around at all?

Here's something you can do if you don't know where to store your books:

1 comment:

  1. Totally agree with you, Nancy! A home without books is devoid of soul for me. Our living room function as our library, but there are also stacks of books in our bedroom, my husband's office, and the bookcases in our kids' rooms are stuffed as well, stacks of magazines live in the bathrooms, and I made sure to have a special shelf for cook books in our kitchen. So really, no room in our house is without reading material.

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