Friday 19 August 2011

Books, books: everywhere!

We are in the midst of the Great Move (which is a misnomer; it's really a quite small move if you keep it in perspective, but that doesn't have the same ring to it). The extension is nearly finished so the children's toys are in there and dining table has been wedged into the kitchen so that I can bruise my hip on it a few times a day.

The old dining room is painted, and we began moving the bookcases and contents down there two days ago.  It's an amazingly time-consuming job.  Steve keeps stomping around grumpily declaring that he's never moving house again.  We had to make tottering piles and towers of books and folders and files from the top floor in the bedrooms to the bathroom.  We haven't been able to open the curtains in the lounge for two days.  (We didn't expect the piles to stay so long).  The bookcases were heavier and more difficult to move than we anticipated.  Anyway, they are moved now, and it's just the long and slow process of refilling them, and trying to get rid of paperwork we don't need, or books we haven't used in four years.

The only thing I really loved was putting my fiction books in piles on the floor and getting to run my fingers over each cover.  Steve informs me that it's really not that normal to sniff at the pages, but I'm ignoring him.  There is something special about each book I have at the moment, having pared my collection down four years ago.  Each one has a vivid memory of the first time I read it; I was in labour when I read this (a Marian Keyes) ; I first read this the Christmas I was twelve and had gastro-enteritis (Jane Eyre) ;  this was one of my earliest reads in a home where there were only a handful of books that Mum and Dad had won at Sunday School or school (a Jim Kjelgaard dog story - this was the one I was sniffing with it's musty, stiff pages, torn dust jacket and yellowed print).

So lovely, to know there are still thousands of books out there I haven't been introduced to yet that might find their way to my shelves.  Just don't tell Ste that next time there'll be even more books to move.

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