| library things |
[May. 21st, 2012|12:42 am] |
I've been trying to borrow all of my sister's books. She is moving, soon, and theoretically also her things are moving, soon, from my apartment. This is probably a good thing, except for the ways it isn't. Her guitars make my living room look way cooler. She's got good books. And normally, almost nothing is really in the way, because the reason you've always heard jokes about closet space in New York apartments is because they apparently put all of those closets in my apartment. Also I love her.
I don't need to read every book. But I suddenly keep thinking of more I should try, with fewer and fewer weeks left. This one she got at the Book Barn last month. The Vonnegut I read years ago. Barack Obama's? That one on top of that pile that's been helping block that yarn project pinned on the floor that seriously I should finish. For instance.
She's occasionally borrowed books from me, and she's such fun to talk about them with. We get excited in complementary ways. She asks for books for plane trips and school breaks, and sets me to my bookcases with tantalizing guidelines: I'd like something funny but not YA; I'd like something serious but not too old; GOD DAMN IT I LEFT MY COPY OF WATERSHIP DOWN ON MY BED, what else is like Watership Down. Methodical, meditative scans of my shelves for the exact right thing to spend one's time with are one of my best happinesses.
I've been thinking we can devise some kind of borrow-by-mail book club so we don't have to give this up. We can print online postage for Media Mail and reuse the same package until one of the books bites it. Long-distance collaboration. She is a reluctant internetter, but has begun starring things on Goodreads, which just makes the world feel like a better place. It can be done.
But the most important one, for now, was to read the copy of Everything Is Illuminated that I bought her four years ago. She read it at the end of 12th grade and loved it so much that she started over when she finished, but had to return it to the library and was disappointed to. She said the ending made her wonder, made her have to choose, and she wanted to know what to choose. She had rather a lot to choose, then. So I gave it for her graduation present. I've meant to read it this whole time she's been here, but this new graduation gave me the right time.
I gave her a perfect book this time around, too. About staying found.
Graduation gifts, I have learned, are really fun to give. |
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