Above all things I love....

Books. Since I was six and learned to decipher those markings on the paper, I've spent hours with my nose in a book. I started with Dick and Jane and Spot, moved to My Friend Flicka and Misty of Chincoteague, then every single Nancy Drew and Perry Mason and Nurse Sue Barton. I moved on to autobiographies, biographies, historical novels, non-fiction on everything under the sun. I'm surprised I don't have a permanent crook in my neck from the time spent walking up and down the aisles of the local library, with my head turned sideways, reading the book spines.

I just flat love books. I actually read Catcher in the Rye three times, trying to understand how a teenage boy really thinks. You'd think three readings would have helped me avoid a crummy boyfriend or two along the way. I'd rather spend an hour in Barnes and Noble than any shoe store on earth (having feet as big as a boat may have something to do with that.) I've been known to move monies from the clothing accrual to the office one, where book money is held and often depleted.

Snuggled right in the middle of six kids, surrounded by four hooligan boys, I found refuge from the storm of a busy house through reading. For some reason I was sick - a lot. Nothing terribly frightening other than a few bouts of pneumonia but I was 'the puny one'. I spent hours and hours reading all thirteen volumes of Childcraft, front to back. Even World Book encyclopedias just fascinated me.

So today - between snow storms - I bundled up and headed out for a day out of the house. There were prescriptions to pick up, some returns at the mall, packages to ship, and our favorite oh-so-classy wine in a box to pick up. But before all that, I headed to the public library.

I just finished last night, slowly on purpose, the last seven pages of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. As I read the last chapter, a line jumped from the page: "It's hard to be truly generous and behave in a forthright manner when you don't know how." How's that for something to chew on? Reading author notes, and bookclub discussion questions (I read ALL of a book!) I saw that the author has apparently written a sequel, "Peony in Love", the name of the last character in Snow Flower. I added my name to the library's waiting list. You can't beat 'free' for a book, and they told me I'm next in line!

Inside a little notebook my daughter, Sarah gave me to keep track of books I've read and those next in line, I jotted a quote from "500 Great Books by Women':

We read to learn, to feel, to stretch beyond our own lives, to escape and to understand. A book has the power to reach back toward us and let us know we are not alone. Up from a flat page of type comes joy or anger or sadness, a sentence that soars, or an image that surprises like a photograph long forgotten. For a few hundred pages we can feel new rhythms, see new images, learn about ourselves, become someone else."

Exactly. The book I chose, to bring home as my #3 Fiction Read of 2009 - "Understood Betsy". It's a book Sarah is reading to her children, written in 1917. By venturing over to the children's section once in awhile I get to relive my own childhood, all over again. Minus the pneumonia.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, "Thank you, Mom, for taking me to that library over and over and over, for making sure that whatever else may have been lacking in my life, books were not. xoxoo"