UtentePuddyRat

My grandmother was a highly educated, extremely erudite individual, with a fairly extensive library of her own. My mother was a hoarder with her own library. Hence, when my grandmother passed away, my mother inherited some of her books and she simply added them to her collection. And I am my mother's daughter. In addition to building my own collection of books, when my mother passed away, I had the good fortune to inherit some of her books (though not all of them as the more expensive and rare of them was kept by a sister for their monetary value, rather than for the value of what was on the pages between the covers, not that I'm bitter about that).

As stated, I am my mother's daughter and am in serious danger of becoming a hoarder myself (I'm already a packrat), so I contacted a personal organizer to help me de-clutter my home and make it into a place in which one feels welcome and pleased to be. Of course, she saw my collection of books in box after box after box and determined that some of them might have to go. I balked, cried, lamented, and ultimately determined, I would NOT give up my books. I decided, instead, to turn my guest room into my own personal library, complete with easy chairs where I can sit quietly and read until my heart's content. I'm having a lot of fun picking out carpet samples and fabric with which to reupholster my chairs.

While I haven't read everything in my library, and may never do so, that, to me, is immaterial. For that matter, if I have read it, that is also no reason to part with it either. I choose to keep my books. They contain a wealth of knowledge and knowledge, so I'm told, is power. By the time I'm done cataloguing everything, I should have several hundred, if not thousands, of books in my library. I'm quite excited at the prospect. Those that don't love books wouldn't understand. I know that most of those on this website do.

I have always been a reader. It has always been a favorite pastime of mine. I love to read. I love to lose myself in a story. When I was a child, I discovered the Oz books by Frank Baum and read every one I could find. Weekly, even daily, trips to the library were normal (I lived in England at the time and we did not have a television).

As I grew older, I would go to the library and examine the spines of the fiction section to look for the widest ones I could find. Then I would finger the pages and inspect the size of the print. The wider the spine, the thinner the paper, and the smaller the print, that was the book for me. In this way, I learned to read books by such authors as Herman Wouk (Winds of War, War and Rememberence), Taylor Caldwell (whom I don't care for as she is too depressing, which is why I've not read much J. D. Salinger either), and Colleen McCullough (love her Masters of Rome series). In fact, I picked up War and Peace once for just this reason (though I never finished it--the first 200 pages were confusing enough).

My tastes, if not eclectic, are at least varied. I love to read fiction, but enjoy real-life crime novels. If I have to read about history, I'd prefer to do so in an historical fiction where I can lose myself in the story of the characters rather than in the events themselves. Science fiction and fantasy are favorites of mine, something I shared with my grandmother.

At the same time, I enjoy the reality of perusing books on such subjects as astronomy, architecture, anthropology, art, and ancient civilizations.