My trip to my favorite vintage store Friday yielded a purchase on something I needed, towels, something I like, vintage china salt & pepper shakers, and something I never pass up- a good book. It was hard cover, clean dust jacket, great condition, $1. I love this store.
I talk about reading a lot, but I don't do it as much as I like. I have to push myself. I'm getting older, so my energy level is lower when I come home from work, and I save that for Bible reading. By the time I get to personal reading, I'm just as likely to turn on a TV show because it's easier on the brain and the tired old eyes.
But I don't want to let reading go. It has been my friend since Dick and Jane, and my profession since 1984.
So I keep pushing. Reading was a kind of savior when things got too tense at home. It was an escape, and it was a relief. It allowed me great anticipation as I looked forward to the next book in the series, (Nancy Drew, Little House, John Jakes' Kent Family series...). Reading afforded an adventure trip to the town library, (where it was cool and quiet and the marble floors were beautiful).
The East Greenwich Free Library is a bit over 100 years old now, (opened in 1915) and has been expanded since you see the first photo postcard below. The marble (I think they were marble) floors have been covered with a rug, and modern technology has replaced the solidly beautiful and always mysterious card catalogs. But it was and is a place for curling up in the quiet, for soaring, for imagination, escape, learning, for meeting book character friends as vivid as any real friend, for lovingly putting a stack of books in my bike basket and pedaling home, that's reading. It's more than a book, it's memories and it's a lifestyle.
Below, EG Free Library then and now. Photos from Google and other web.
So I look forward to curling up on the couch and meeting Jane Austen's Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, just as I had done in 1965 in meeting Dick and Jane, 1970 with Nancy Drew, Laura Ingalls, and Harriet the Spy, and then teen and college years with Tolkein, Asimov, Verne, and Clarke...
Isn't it great we never run out of books?
Here's a list of 100 top classic books. Do you agree?
The Greatest Books
The editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the :best and most central works in world literature."
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