Talking Bookshelves

The other day, my middle daughter handed me a book. “Mom, this was great! You should read it too.” I smiled, thanked her and added it to the pile of books on my desk (actually the dining room table, a place we don’t eat together often because of all the books) that are waiting for my attention.

As a writer of fiction, it’s important that I keep up to date on the current trends in the writing world and experience what publishers tell me is good.

As a consumer of information, I need, well, information. In homeschooling, I don’t teach the girls about fantasy worlds, but this world. As a diabetic, I need to understand the disease so I can overcome the setbacks. I need recipes. There are hundreds of books on diet, nutrition and exercise that scream at me from the shelves to be picked up and read so I can look like a model, books that beckon me toward adventure, new worlds and God.

If my books could talk, the health books would tell me not to read while I eat so I can fully appreciate the food. However, it’s during lunch that I have the most time to read. That’s when everyone is content to stop their homeschooling for an hour, dive into their books and just relax.

But like competitive siblings, I did have to separate the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon from my small library of bible studies, bibles and bible commentary. Some of the scenes between Jamie and Clare were making the Saints blush. The Fraser’s are now safely tucked into a bookshelf upstairs where lurking eyes can’t pry.

Some of the books my children are reading have things in common with my Christian library. C.S. Lewis walks freely from bookshelf to bookshelf, making comparisons. He’s unique in that he is as welcomed on the ‘good book’ shelf as much as the ‘fantasy’ shelf.

Madeleine L’Engle, Jean Craighead George, Louis Sachar, Gary D. Schmidt, Dave Berry and Pierson Ridley, Cornelia Funke, E.B. White, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and many others share another book shelf quite peaceably, although there is some jealousy among those who are read repeatedly and therefore less dusty.

Then there is the non-fiction bookshelf filled with glossy, two-page spreads of the natural world, diagrams, paragraph after chapter of interesting facts and opinions. If I lean closely to this shelf, I can hear the academic whisperings of the experts debating concepts and theories. Whoever is selected off this shelf is momentarily exalted to kingship, but it is usually short lived as the ever-fluid interests of growing children change as much as Michigan weather.

Tomorrow will find my children re-reading their favorite scenes of past books after they venture into new territories with Lewis and Clark. Or perhaps we will all gather together around a cookbook and plan next week’s meals. Wherever we go, whatever we read, our lives are enriched by the broadness of the genres and the scope of time and place that emerges from the printed word.