Book Board Chat

sareader - I know what you mean about books feeling like old friends. I have so many like that and though I weed through and cull, some of them I just can't part with because of their memories. Long ago cleared out the paperback fiction and then eventually hardcover fiction to make more shelf space. For purely nostalgic reasons, I only kept paperback copies of Valley of the Dolls, Once is Not Enough, The Carpetbaggers (loved Harold Robbins early fiction) Peyton Place and two autobiographies--Fortunate Son and The Coal Miner's Daugher. Now I buy and keep only non-fiction. Think my NF shelves are better stocked than our local small town library which is struggling along. I also collected cookbooks, but have managed to pare that down to two floor to ceiling shelves. I noticed that I don't cook much anymore, we eat out a lot, but there are still so many memories with those cookbooks and occasionally I still do use some of the recipes. I also sell the old promotional cookbooks and have a room full of those that take up a lot of real estate (not to mention those in bins and boxes in the closets). My husband is a big reader too, of fiction. To support our reading habit, we had to resort to the library some years back. Living near Houston, there's a lot of competition for the new releases, but we make do with luck and timing and reserving copies. We have library cards to four different libraries that we use to feed our habit! We solved the problem of getting the library books mixed in with our own by just keeping the ones we're not reading in a large book bag. There's a great used bookstore that we frequent also that helps fill in some of the fiction spaces and we trade those back. Some days I look around and think to myself that our main furniture consists of bookshelves with a place to sit, sleep and eat thrown in as a mere afterthought. Can't hardly hire anyone in town to help me move anything because they have shuffled my many boxes of books around one time to many. Never met a book I didn't like. Should also mention that we live in a small 1,110 sq ft house with three cats and two birds (one borrowed). Thank goodness they don't like to read too.