A Family of Bookworms

I was down to my parent’s place this past weekend, as the cat and I both like to have a visit to the country every couple of weeks, catch up on what’s new and interesting. My parents are currently redoing the TV room, which also includes the computer, games, puzzles and books. That is, the part of the books that is not my personal collection, or the random stuff in crocks and cupboards, or the magazine archives, or most of the how-to books. It’s funny how I always realized we were maybe more than average readers in the family – it was not and is still not unusual for dinner conversation to be completely absent because everyone is reading at the table – but it never quite hit me how many books we’ve managed to accumulate. Mom and I spent part of Saturday going through the books to see what we might get rid of, as Dad wanted to see if we could clear some shelf space for him to use for filing. We went through old university texts of Dad’s, novels, children’s books, comics, local history, dictionaries and phrase books, gardening books…you name it.

A couple hours later, we had 6 boxes of books to donate at the second-hand store, plus some puzzles and games, and some stuff set aside for my aunt’s children. Now those 6 boxes do not represent more than, say, a quarter of the total of the books in the TV room, and that room has maybe, maybe, a quarter of the books in the house. They get read, and re-read, and on top of that, Dad and I still make good inroads on the public library, I have my stash at the apartment, Mom trades books with her sister, and my sibs do a fair bit of reading too. Almost makes me wonder how we manage to get anything else done.

Sunday, we boiled up a pot of walnut husks and chestnut hulls and onion skins to dye old sheeting. Mom is going to weave a rug to go with the TV room's new look. It;s going to be very cool. Pictures, though, will have to wait until my next trip.