I got such a response from my post, "My name is Pat. I am an addict," about my addiction to books in both reading them AND collecting them.
It's nice to know that there are other people out there who drink the Kool-Aid!
Snort!
You may wonder how my husband, Jim, fits into this picture. Do you feel sorry for him that he has to put up with my addiction?
STOP RIGHT THERE.
Why?
Because he is a fellow addict!
In fact, I think he is the one to blame for my addiction. As far as collecting the books, anyway.
My love for the library goes way back to when I was a young girl. But I don't remember collecting books until after I married Jim. Maybe it stems from this incident.
Jim was a divorced bachelor for 10 years before we married. We dated for two years before we got married. He never asked me back to his apartment and my mother was sure that he was married! Finally he asked me to come back to his place.
I knew why he put off asking me.
He lived pretty simple. A folding table in the kitchen with a lawn chair, a lawn chair in the living room with a TV, a futon in the bedroom on the floor.
And about 300 books. He built shelves across the whole wall of his apartment using 2 x 4's that he had stained a dark wood color.
When Jim and I got married we packed up his "furniture" and fit it in the back of my station wagon (yes, it was the 1980's!) But with all his books? Boxes and boxes of books! Took us several trips.
Jim's collection grew (some would say "like a fungus") and I began my own collection. We ended up with several bookshelves lined up in a row very much like in a library only they were in our basement. When we decided to hit the road in our RV and depart with a lot of our possessions, we ended up donating 650 books to the library!
650 books!
We STILL packed up probably 300 or 400 books. Which we now are grappling with and fumbling through.
Like I said.
My name is Pat. And I am an addict.
And I am married to one, too!
11 comments:
Great post. It's good that you both like books...lol. Nurture it, Pat, my hubby has gone off reading, He says he can't concentrate. This breaks my heart because he was once such an avid reader.
smiles...i infected my wife...she did not like to read until i got her into it...smiles...she has no attachment though...she keeps about 12...gets rid of the rest...i just dont understand...smiles....
My ex-h loved books as much as me and it killed me to have to split them up when I left; and it kills me even more that he got evicted and died, so all those books I could have taken were probably sold or donated or thrown out. :(
Well, you got one more on the way. Mailed it Friday!
It's nice you are able to share a common interest. I wish my husband was a reader. His only interest is sports. I can't understand how anyone cannot love books.
We both read, too. Have a ton of books in the house. Once in awhile we go through them and donate a few, but at least for me, some of them are old friends and I can't part with them.
My husband thinks I am weird because I will read old favorites many times. It's like catching up with someone I haven't seen in awhile.
When my son was in 1st grade, his teacher sent home a book club order form. We didn't order anything. Evidently most of the other parents didn't either.
She sent home a pissy letter with all the children about how reading is important and how disappointed she was that people weren't taking advantage of the opportunity to make lifelong readers out of their children.
So I went into his bedroom and counted his books. He had 268 of them. I wrote that on the back of the snippy little note she'd sent home and sent it back with him.
We're all addicted here, too.
Nice to be married to mutual enablers! :) Kinda like me and my husband with NASCAR. Kinda...
There ARE worse addictions than books after all...
Looks like you picked a winner.
You know, looking at your blog's picture of all those cacti....I think I saw something like that on a golf course.
I'm apparently seeing penises everywhere, I tell you. I feel like I'm in Elton John's apartment.
I have tons and tons of books. I love them. I have to get rid of some though because we move a lot thanks to the military and are only allowed so much weight.
You met your perfect soul-mate back then (and so did Jim)! Wouldn't it be awful to be married to someone who didn't like to read? (I know some women who are and I don't think I could live like that.)
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