Books

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to live in a room with wall-to-wall bookshelves that went from floor to ceiling, and they would be filled with all the books that I have read and that I would read over and over again.

In reality, I ended up with one bookshelf in the basement of the home we sold almost 4 years ago. And it took several years to set that up. However, I started adding books to a smaller bookshelf when I started tutoring. These were books for kids - books I could read with them and books that they would be interested in reading. Then, when I got my teaching job, I also started collecting books for my classroom.

As I unpacked the boxes of books in my current home, I had to make the pantry shelf (that I couldn’t fit in my new kitchen) my third bookshelf. For the first time, in a long time, I actually flipped through the pages of some of the books I have. Each book took me back in time. And it was fun to organize them in a way that made sense to me.

Today, my friend Manda wondered if I had a copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’. I did and she came over to borrow it. While I was waiting for her, I turned the cover page and saw my name neatly written on the title page. I wasn’t sure if I bought the book for the Fall term of 1994 or the Winter term of 1995 or for the 1994-1995 academic year. It hit me that that was over 30 years ago! I turned another page and read a quotation by F. Scott Fitzgerald about writing. As I was reading it, my friend arrived. She wanted to borrow it for her 17-year-old who is enrolled in a Grade 12 English course. When she saw my name in the book, she almost felt guilty for ever asking for it.

There was a time I would buy a copy of the book to give to a person who asked to borrow my copy of that book. There was no way I would let someone else’s hands touch a book of mine. Those days are over. As a mother, a tutor and a teacher, I have been surrounded by hands that have been in questionable places and I am not sure anything can be sanitized 100%. Can I clean each page of a book with a disinfectant wipe? Does it matter to have a book in pristine condition or a book that served its purpose multiple times?

I did spend some time earlier in the day with Manda, and I mentioned the bots on my blog. She was so worried that she wanted me to send her a document with all my blog posts so she could feed that into some Artificial Intelligence app and produce a book that I could self-publish before a bot could do the very same. For all I know, that’s probably been done already. So, I told my friend that I will decide how I will tell a story when I am ready to tell that story.

At the end of the day, after she left with ‘The Great Gatsby’, I realized that I need to read it again. I need to read a whole bunch of books again.