Books for the holidays

  My final tally for books read in 2011 is 119.  This number includes an unedited proof, therefore 118 are reflected on my Goodreads and Shelfari shelves.  This is the largest number of books I've ever read in one year.  I attribute this mostly to not spending as much time on the computer (aka getting frustrated at my slow hard drive and giving up).  Will this record ever be broken?  I can't really say.  As I've mentioned before, I don't like competition, and competing with yourself is particularly pointless.  I like astounding people with the total though.  I like that a lot actually.  I also like the round number of 100.  So I have decided to strive for 100 again this year, which is an average of 1 book every 3.65 days.  But I will accept whatever number I make it to.

  I don't usually ask for books for christmas; I ask for Chapters gift certificates.  This year, I asked for specific titles and got them from my book-loving friends.  Perhaps I'll continue to do this every year.  The trick is to ask for specific books from specific people so that you don't get multiple copies of the same book.


  The best part of giving christmas presents is the extra room in your luggage for bringing back books.  I spent a week with family in BC and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I even got the honour of editing a proof copy of a book written by a member of the family.  That was cool!  Two days before coming home, I visited a local secondhand bookstore.  I spent two hours browsing to my heart's content.  And then I cashed out.  I bought 16 books (3 to give as gifts) and the owner gave me a lovely discount.  It wasn't until I went to pay for the books that I noticed the sign saying "cash or cheque only".  Thankfully, I'd stopped at the ATM for cash first.  Also, thankfully, the discount brought the total down to the exact amount of cash I had on hand: $60.  I personally feel no shame about this.  It was only the worry about possible negative comments from family that I snuck the pile into the house.  I was very happy that a few books from my very long (and ever-growing) to-read list were among my purchases.  Shoving my clothes into the smaller suitcase and putting the pile of books into my larger backpack, my newly-acquired reading material made it safely back across the country and now sit happily on my bookshelves.

  Also for the holidays, my mother brought me books she has been keeping from our childhood.  I am now the proud owner of the Collier's Junior Classics 10-volume set.  I finally can reread "The Five Chinese Brothers" whenever I wish.  Unfortunately, the set has been stored in a variety of garages over the years and had become a little unsightly.  As I was cleaning them up, I browsed through the table of contents of each.  This was when I realized that although I had loved them as a child, I never got very far in them.  "The Five Chinese Brothers" is in the first volume, along with all the various nursery rhymes I am familiar with, and I recognized a few titles from the second volume.  Any titles I recognized in the subsequent volumes are because I have encountered them elsewhere; some I have read and some I am just familiar with superficially.  This means I have a lot to catch up on.  Perhaps there will be stories from this collection that I will share lovingly with my brand-new niece as she grows older.  I fully intend to wholeheartedly support her love of reading for the rest of our lives.  And that makes me happy.

Read on,
Paula