On Books and Saturday Afternoons

I visited the library this lovely fall Saturday afternoon and picked up a plethora of different titles. Books on knitting. Books on quitting sugar. Books on writing cookbooks. Books on decorating shabby chic style. Cookbooks. Christmas novels.

The local library was a hub of interesting activity. There was chess club going on.  Some people using computers they don’t have at home.  Some doing homework. Some in meetings. Children playing games and building puzzles. A few people gathered outside under the yellow and orange leaves reading books at picnic tables. I just wanted to race home and browse through the books I borrowed but. alas, the dog park called or rather, the dog.

 Is there anything better than finding a comfy place of solitude and turning the pages of a lovely book?  Getting lost in the pictures and stories. Waiting for the surprises on each page. And the ideas!  As if I don’t have enough ideas of my own. Dreaming of possibilities. Very often as lovely as a visit with a dear friend.  A hot cup of tea and a cozy blanket or a sit by the fireplace. A good novel is as good as a vacation. Often I am sad to come to the end of a very good story.  Sometimes I will purposely only read a chapter a day to make it last longer.  Other times I will not do anything else and finish the book in a day because it’s too good to put down. Then  there are times that I almost forget about my own life and its problems until I finish the book and come back to reality.  I love those kind of stories.  I love it when I find myself laughing out loud or shedding a tear or two.

I dream of a floor to ceiling, wall to wall library with one of those sliding ladders. We have 9 foot ceilings so I think a sliding ladder would be just the ticket and I would put my favorite genres on the top shelves just so I could use it.  I have stacks of books piled up in every once empty spot I can find around the house.  A home filled with books suggests people with broad horizons.  Well in our case, it just suggests.  My husband is not a reader. He read the bare minimum of text books to graduate from uni and now it’s just newspapers and the Internet.  He can’t understand my son and my love of reading, writing and books. He’s trying to figure out who’s keeping Indigo in business.  Shhhh.  All he’d have to do is look at my bank statement. I have over 160 cookbooks alone.  I love reading cookbooks.  Especially ones with great photography and information about the culture and region.  Some Saturday I just want to spend the entire day browsing through them and picking out recipes I want to try.

I know the Internet seems like it should have shut down the publishing industry by now but there’s  something so nostalgic and wholesome about actually holding a book in your hands.  Feeling the pages. Knowing the page number. Breaking it open even if you’re not close to a power source. Sharing a favorite book with a dear friend or child. Rereading your favorite stories to relive the magic.  Gazing at the glossy photos on high quality paper.  You just can’t replace that.

Then there is the Bible.  The ultimate writing.  Filled with powerful words that inspire change and action.  Delicate words that heal the soul. Instruction to guide us from our creator and the creator of the universe.  It says the Bible is living and active and more powerful than a double edged sword and it won’t return void.  I have found this to be true.  I love reading the Bible because everytime, it says something new. Or speaks to me in a way it hasn’t before. Even if I have read that passage before. It’s like reading a new book almost every time.

My mom was an English teacher and of course read us all the classics and encouraged us to read for ourselves.  Hans Christian Anderson. Robert Louis Stevenson. Tom Sawyer. Huckleberry Finn. Peter Pan. Aesop’s fables. Mother goose. I devoured every Nancy Drew mystery I could get my hands on when I was a kid. My own kids grew up on Lord of the Rings, Narnia and Harry Potter. Reading enlarges your life and your thinking. It’s not ‘doing nothing’ like so many non readers like to accuse us of.

Interestingly enough, one of my favorite movies is about books. You’ve Got Mail.  I know you thought it was about meeting someone over the Internet but both lead characters own book stores.  One, a quaint, lovely, children’s book story complete with story time and the story book lady.  The other, a large book store like Indigo ‘where you can mingle, mix and be.’  When Indigo used to be Chapters and used to have a Starbucks attached and lovely little reading areas with chairs and couches and tables, I adored just finding a little corner and gathering up a bunch of books and magazines and spending the afternoon.  My little guilty pleasure.  Sadly, those days are over. But I can recreate this atmosphere in my own home.  Grab a bunch of books and magazines and turn on the fireplace.  Grab a cup of tea and get lost in books and reading.  Learning new things every day.  Or reliving familiar memories through the stories.  Gathering ideas. It’s like spending the afternoon with my old friends.