It's Just Me, Isn't It?: Read Anything Good Lately?

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."

- Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

When my husband received a job transfer and we had to pack up our oldest two children and move, I chose our new house the moment I stepped in the front door. It was an adorable house, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big living area and coverings on every window. All of that was secondary to what you saw as soon a you walked in - a full wall of bookcase. That alone sold me on the house.

"You have too many books," my children occasionally say. Blasphemy! There is no such thing as too many books.

I have two entire shelves of biographies and autobiographies. Nicola Tesla, David Crosby, Lee Harvey Oswald, Nichelle Nichols, Dian Fossey... all their lives are right there in my living room.

I have two shelves of just comics – my vintage "Peanuts" collection, my Garfield, my Bloom County, every Calvin and Hobbes ever published and my autographed "Pickles" books.

I have shelves for religion, travel, theater. We own a lot of big, glossy coffee table books (and no coffee tables). We have books for our homeschool lessons and books for fun. We have favorite genres – mystery! – and authors. All my Tony Hillermans sit together, as do my husband's Agatha Christies. I have crime books, everything from "Helter Skelter" to volumes by FBI profiler John Douglas.

And the children's books, oh, the children's books. Sesame Street, Disney, Dr. Seuss, fairy tales, the Black Stallion, Henry Huggins, the Borrowers, Heidi… I hang onto books my children have long outgrown, knowing that, someday, there will be grandkids reading them.

Once when a girlfriend came to our house with her daughter, she looked at the shelves that line our living room and said to her girl, "This is what your house will look like."

Sometimes, someone will say, "Have you actually read all these?" Well, most of them. Those I haven't, someone else here has. I have no interest in vintage electronics books, but my husband does.

I even own stuff I'm not very fond of. I'm not a big fan of "Catcher in the Rye." I just want to smack Holden. I own a complete copy of the Warren Commission, despite finding it flawed and inaccurate. I think it's important to be familiar with these books, whether I enjoy them or not.

This shelf sits at the end of our upstairs hallway, between two bedrooms.

This one, just deep enough for paperbacks, sits in the short passage between my living room and kitchen.

This one sits on our stairway landing.

You know how educators are always giving tips on "How to get your kids to read"? We read those articles, but we don't need them.

This is one of my son's three bookcases.

This is my daughter's. She has only one, but it's almost ceiling height, as opposed to her brother's waist high ones.

All four of my kids are voracious readers. They all spent their childhoods saying, "Can we go look at books?" every time we walked into a store. (If the store had no books, it was hardly worth their time.) They'd sit on the floor, quietly reading about dinosaurs or Strawberry Shortcake or anything else that caught their fancy until I finally dragged them away. Frequently, we bought something. Big bookstores have so many fabulous things, I can afford to go into them only rarely. I love thrift stores – "You want that stack of twelve books? Sure!"

People would swoon over my kids. One woman, a schoolteacher, was so delighted by the sight of them crosslegged in the aisles, surrounded by books, that she gushed for fully 15 minutes. "I wish my students could see this!" she said repeatedly.

I used to resist when my kids each wanted their own copy of something like the Harry Potter series, but I finally relented, so they each have their own. So why are books 1 through 4 missing off of MY shelves, hmm? Anyone?

I admit it; I have occasionally spent more on books than on groceries in any given month.

We have e-readers now, too. My husband and son walk around with almost 800 books in their hands every day. While that's great, I prefer paper. For one thing, I just see it differently. I can proofread something on my computer over and over and over, find no flaws, then see a typo as soon as the printer spits out the page. (Meanwhile, one reason my husband loves e-books is that he reads them on black pages with white type, something that causes less eye strain and better comprehension for people with ADD.)

I also can't shake my "I grew up during the Cold War" sensibilities; we all grew up wondering how life would be different After the Bombs Dropped. In a world with no batteries, electricity or Internet, e-readers are paperweights. My paper books could potentially last for centuries.

Still, looking at these photos, I can see a potential problem. Most of my shelves aren't very tidy. Then there's my stairs