Monday Required Reading. This is a bit different than what I normally share in these Monday Readings. Today I am sending you off to read a blog post. "Song of My Shelf" by Abigail Deutsch explores her relationship with her bookshelf, and, I have to say, tugs at my heartstrings a bit. If you are a fellow bookworm, I think you will enjoy this. If you aren't...well then what are you even doing on this blog? Just kidding. Sort of.

I recently learned, to my alarm, that social scientists have a name for people like me. A "boomeranger" is a product of baby-boomer parents who, after college, zips back to her native Zip Code, and to the room she has lived in since the age of eight. This situation is not merely embarrassing. It is, tactically speaking, catastrophic. For I am an especially bookish boomeranger, and I must fit all the volumes I've ever acquired into a room roughly the size of a spacious coffin. 

At eight, I selected my own bookshelves - six white plastic slats that projected from my wall like rungs of a giant ladder, the highest too high to reach, the lowest perfect for my magic-wand collection, cactus collection, and books. The bindings of my skinny paperbacks coalesced into a rainbow that hovered just above the carpet. 

For reasons no longer known, I also selected wallpaper that featured sickly looking farmer women feeding chickens under an overcast sky. In such pasty, pastoral company, I grew up. And my book collection got bigger, too, clambering steadily up the shelves. 

*** 

When I was eight, one of my favorite books was Patricia MacLachlan's "The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt." Minna is a precocious eleven-year-old who asks her father, "Did you fall in love at noon?" "At noon," her father answers, "and every day thereafter at 3:00, and at 5:30 and again at 6:45, 11:10...." 

So it was and is with me and books: I fell in love at seventeen, and again at eighteen, and twenty-two, and, just yesterday, at twenty-seven. 

[KEEP READING]