Me and books, once I acquire them I find it difficult to set them back into the world and let them be adopted by someone else. Over the course of every contract I acquire dozens of books. They fill up my desk cubbyholes and take up residence on the shelves of the cabin, I even have book ends at ‘home’ for specifically that reason. I never end up reading them all. And at the end of every contract I have to do what I dislike the most – I have to give them back.
It’s less difficult if I do it quickly, like taking off a band-aid. Write down the names and authors of the ones I didn’t have time to delve into, and put them carefully into the book orphanage that lives next to my desk. I just don’t have enough room in my suitcase to take them all home with me. Not when there are over a dozen of them.
And that’s just what I haven’t read. My list of ‘finished’ or ‘almost finished’ is above 20.
It’s been an interesting contract.
But it’s amazing how difficult it was to go through them all and figure out which ones were going home with me (three in total I think), and which one was being set aside for the plane (a guest gave me Ginger Rogers’ biography, I suspect that’s a given for the flight home), and which are heading back to the orphanage to be taken on other planes to other places.
If I ever do move into a place of my own, there is apparently no question that I have to have room for an awful lot of book shelves!