More books. Good books. My books. Their books. Books books books.
It is probably true that at some point we will have to declare a books moritorium. However, that day is not today. I managed to clear a whole bunch of books out of our lives in the process of returning them to the shelves after the glorious kissable floor was installed and then, serendipitously, I found this place. Oh Daedalus, you creator of marvels, you wizard of bargains, how I love you. Several marvellous (cheap!) books are on their way to us, to be read, loved, dripped on and otherwise devoured. I also found a marvellous used bookstore on Fairmount which I had to drag myself out of with my sane arm while my book-crazed arm still tried to wrench wonderful books off the shelves. I managed to leave there with only half a dozen books, mostly for Daniel, but including The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory which if you haven’t already read it, go now, go go go. It’s jolly and well written and even though I know Anne cops it in the end, it had me hoping it would somehow work out all right.
C.S. Lewis wrote about his respect for the physical book, how he would wash his hands before handling them, how he would never eat while reading, nor sip tea nor read in the bathtub (egads!). I gave this deep thought since I generally like C.S. Lewis and respect his views. In the end, I decided that the physical book is simply a vehicle for words, almost an illusion and certainly should not be worshipped, idol-like, but used. This does not extend to allowing the children to jump on books or use them as weapons, but on the whole, we are not great respectors of the book object in this house. We eat while reading (and read while eating); we drink things and drip them on books. We read in the tub. I would read in the shower if I could figure out how to do it. We read in the garden and forget we left our book under the rosebush. We drop books accidentally in the sink while trying to read and wash-up at the same time. We even write on books sometimes (although never to obscure the text).
However, we adore the words. We injest them, pet them, roll them around in the inky caverns of our minds and mouths and make them part of ourselves. A bad book is worse than a Twinkie. It’s brain junk. Not just a lifetime on the hips but a lifetime in the neurons, firing off other texts, other words and creating monsters. Our children seem to be inheriting this word-lust. Daniel quotes what he’s reading almost unconsciously and could recite Jabberwocky in its entirety before he was two. Helena can now recite huge swathes of Winnie the Pooh and is often heard to mutter phrases like “Oh help and bother.”
What this suggests to me is that it is vitally important what you pour into their spongy brains. What you pour in, stays in. It can be fluff or it can be stuff, or ideally a mixture of both. Like this (which I found via the Middle of Nowhere, for which I thank her. It’s wonderful, a British TinTin (if that’s not too facile a description) and I’m thinking Daniel will love it.
oh Yes, books – the most important thing next to love a child can have, I think. I am very very pleased to have found the Rainbow Orchid, as I’ve been reading Tintin since primary, and if my Tintin collection were a pair of shoes, the pages would have big gaping holes in…