My Books Are Eating Me!

I have a lot of books. I have books the way some people in New York have cockroaches - it's not a collection, it's an infestation. And I think they're trying to get me.

I must say it's not a terribly sane collection anyway. I have books for every possible eventuality, by which I mean, I have at least (at the very least) two or three books for every mood. Therefore, it is entirely likely that you will find Wind in the Willows sitting happily next to Sexual Personae, or Agatha Christie cuddling up with Lawrence Durrell (wouldn't you just love to see that one in real life?), or Rudyard Kipling and M.F.K. Fisher having a nice chat. You never know what the hell you'll come across. (Just the other day I discovered that I had a copy of a book called "Dare To Repair" - this seems to be a women's manual on household repairs. What on earth was I thinking? I can't even clean the broiler with any amount of dexterity. No, of course I'm not getting rid of it...you never know.)

I have a living room full of books. My bedroom is full of books to the extent that I'm beginning to worry...I have the ironing board in front of the ceiling high bookshelf in my room and if I iron too energetically, the books have been known to fall on my head. This is probably because I find something downstairs and start reading it and then bring it upstairs to continue reading it in bed, and then I stuff it in the bookshelf...and never take anything downstairs again. Oh, did I mention that I sleep in one-quarter of the bed because I have books in the other three-quarters of it? (And cats, of course.) (Have I mentioned that I really need a social life? I sound like a crazy cat/book lady.) And of course Sarah's room is full of books because like any normal parent, I feel that reading is the most important thing you can teach your child.

The main problem is that I can never find anything I want to read. No, no, I don't mean it that way - I mean that if I have a certain book in mind that I feel like reading at that exact moment, there is absolutely no way that I can find it in the literary chaos. The upside to this is that of course I find something else that I've been meaning to reread for a while and settle down with it, but I still keep looking for the thing I wanted originally...which leads to more books falling on my head. Wouldn't it be just too bizarre if my reading habits caused me to have some sort of brain injury that rendered me incapable of reading? There's a nice odd thought.

In other news, there isn't any. I did not win Mega Millions today. George Clooney did not suddenly decide to break up with his girlfriend and start asking me out, nor did Harrison Ford. Nor, and I'm getting annoyed about this, did my state income tax refund come.

Well, I need the income tax refund because there's this book I want to buy...

(One of the cats just threw up on that damn rug again. I wonder if there's a method for taking care of that in my Dare to Repair book - and if so, is it under C for Cats, V for Vomit, or K for Kill?)

Love, Wendy