Books

If you’ve ever been to our house, you know there are books everywhere. This is because I like books, not because I’ve read them all.

I’m not sure when my fascination with books began, but I have to say it must have been fairly early, possibly even before kindergarten. I remember reading when I was four, thanks to parents who read to me a lot, so books probably played a pretty important part of those early formative years. That, and my dad’s parents had a library, a room filled with bookshelves covered in books, and for some reason that always intrigued me. Of course, their living room was filled with old newspapers and magazines and crap in general, so it could have just been that they were hoarders, of which I apparently inherited that trait as well.

I can’t say that I enjoy a particular genre better than another, as I have children’s books ranging from the cardboard toddler variety all the way up to adult biographies and fiction, but will say I enjoy reading. Watching a movie or TV show is a fine form of entertainment, but reading a book sparks my imagination and completely takes me into the world the author has created.

With these new handheld reading devices once again trying to take over the market, as they failed to do ten years ago when they all claimed physical books would be a thing of the past, it seems to have sparked my interest once again as what makes me love books. Is it the feel of the paper? The soft ink lettering on that slightly off-white to newsprint colored paper? The book cover and/or jacket, of which I am 100% guilty of judging a book on it’s cover, as long as the first sentence of the book draws me in too? These are all things that a digital reader will not have, but are all things that draw me to touch, peruse and ultimately read a book. I’m certain they have their place in the book market, but I can’t say that it is necessarily going to change the way people buy books. For a guilty pleasure read, like the Twilight series, I can see having a digital copy rather than a physical one, as it probably will be a one time read through, but a series like The Chronicles of Narnia I can’t imagine not physically holding the book and turning the pages, even though I’ve read them all four times.

Then there are the books I haven’t read, which, mind you, there are a lot. One year the library had their book sale, which you bought books by the bag for a dollar a bag. I ended up with forty some odd hardcover books that I picked up for two bucks not because they were titles I would read, but because they had that classic book cover and binding that just looks good on a shelf. Twelve years later, I’m about ready to dive into some of them, as they have intrigued me sitting there on the shelf, waiting to once again be held and read. Eight of them, however, will end up at Goodwill, as for some reason, I bought the 1992 edition of Books in Print, four of which list by Author and the other four by Title. Again, this was probably a purchase done strictly by looks, as reference books have that scholarly appearance unmatched by any non-fiction work. I don’t feel bad about getting rid of these books mostly because they don’t have that sense of history that older books have, even if they are out of date and inaccurate, like the World’s Popular Encyclopedia set from 1937 we picked up at an estate sale. I’m thinking out of those old books, the one that intrigues me the most and will probably be my first read, is The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque… albeit, the translated version, as it was originally written in German, and published in Germany in April 1931. My copy is from May 1931 as the English translated copy, in its second printing from that same month.

I’m serious when I say I have an eclectic mix of books, and they really are in no particular order. I mean, who in their right mind would have Andy Griffiths The Day My Butt Went Psycho! between Handbook for the Soul and Shad Helmstetter’s What to Say When You Talk to Your Self? Or a book about an animal whose scrotum is so big, he used it as a parachute to land on the earth (which, by the way, Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins is an absolutely fantastic read) on the same shelf as R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series and Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach? Then there are books that I adore, yet do not own, like Where the Wild Things Are. Okay, so I do own it, but I only have the German version, Wo die wilden Kerle wohnen.

Yes, my love affair with books even got me into writing and illustrating my own, most of which nobody has ever looked at. Then again, ninety percent of these I did while in high school when I had dreams of becoming a published author before graduation, but my usual lack of motivation and ambition was quite the deterrence. Instead, they sit in a file cabinet or a box, and some in files I can no longer access on the computer because we don’t have a floppy disk drive, and I’m certain the magnetism has worn out on those disks anyway. I even toyed with the notion of submitting some of my work, and did a massive edit of my first young adult novel to get it ready for publishing six years ago, and once I was done, saved all the files onto a CD and haven’t looked at it since.

One would think that being unemployed over this last year and a half, I would have taken some of this time to retry, but a part of me has a hard time letting go of characters I created and putting them in someone else’s hands. If I had the money, I’d self publish instead, which yes, is a lot of effort, but at the same time, I will still own my creative work, not a publishing company who will possibly sell off the movie rights to some second-rate film school director who will mutilate my characters and completely destroy any resemblance to the original work (Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice, anyone?) Even though the chances of that happening are slim, fear of it is never far from my mind. I’ve even put a lot of research into self-publishing and how to purchase my own ISBNs and starting a publishing company, but follow-through is not a strong point of mine. Still, those lofty dreams are there, and maybe, someday, a fire will get lit under my ass to do something about them.