My best friends..for life!

Sorry Slamdance and Mr. D, sadly I am not talking about you – though you are thoroughly awesome. I’m talking about my books.
Apartment Therapy just ran a post about decluttering, which when you have children becomes more of an issue, and we already have a cluttery house to begin with. In my defense, many people have told me they like my cluttery house and that it makes them feel at home, but that’s beside the point.
In the article they talk about needing to get rid of books in order to make room for new ideas, which I think is rubbish! I love my books, as does Mr. L. We love reading, being able to reference something without needing the interwebs, and I think there is something wonderful about holding a book in your hands and having the ability to indelibly imprint it with the experience you have reading it, be it through a note, or pressing a flower or leaf from the park or city where you’ve read it, or through spilled batter on its pages.
Mr. L and I do a book purge roughly every six months though, though at this point we’ve become so particular in what we purchase it’s been over a year since we’ve done a proper book purge. Normally it’s things we end up not using as much, or duplicates that we’ve amassed, or books we just didn’t like enough to keep after we’d finished them. And now the Mouse is developing her own library of board books, picture books and her current favourite, touch and feel books.
She loves turning pages on her books, though she isn’t really interested in the story yet, but that will come with time. It makes me so very happy to see that she’s already in love with literature, and it gives me hope. It’s so easy to turn to television, or computer, or any tablet or smartphone, but I just can’t believe that we’ll stop printing books. Sure I could take a thousand books with me on an ereader, and read whatever I want anywhere in the world, but they’re just bits in a machine, they aren’t a reminder of that place where I read it.
The best example I can think of is when I bought my copy of Ex-Libris, by Anne Fadiman. I was 18, and I was in London for the first time. I was on my own, and a little homesick, so I went to the British Library. After looking at the exhibits, I stopped in the shop to look around. I didn’t intend to buy a book, but for some reason this book caught my eye, and I had to buy it. It’s become one of my favourite books since then. When I’m feeling sad, I’ll pic it up and read one of her essays, and it makes me feel better. I doubt that I could get the same feeling from an ebook that I downloaded one afternoon while waiting in line at the grocers.

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