My bookshelf

Ever since we bought this house, five years ago, we'd been struggling for a good way to store books in our bedroom. We have a very long wall at the foot of our bed, but it's interrupted by an air intake for the A/C unit, which means we can't cover it over. We couldn't figure a creative way to build in bookshelves while avoiding the intake.

As a result, most of our books resided in an old bookshelf that B had built years ago, but when we turned the guest room into Campbell's bedroom, the bookshelf had to go. As a result, all the books moved into our closet onto the top shelves, which quickly reached the point of collapse.

Then I went to IKEA, which opened in Austin last winter and has quickly become my favorite store, other than Target, and I found my dream bookshelf. Making it really, really perfect is that it has an open back, which means that we can put it in front of the air intake without a problem. As a thank you to B for putting the bookshelf together with me, I even gave B a few shelves for his Stephen King books.

And I have a cubby just for my grammar/style/editing collection. B laughed and called me a geek because I have enough of those books to warrant a whole cubby just for them.

As big as the bookshelf is, it doesn't hold all of our books. Some still reside on the top shelves of the closet - most of them are B's science fiction and horror books (we have VERY different tastes in literature), but quite a few of mine are ending up there as well.

The girls are developing quite a collection of books, too. I cleaned up their bookshelf the other day, hoping to weed out some of their books. But other than the give-away books from fast-food chains, I didn't get rid of any. Their collection is slowly creeping up the bookshelf; soon we'll have to find new places to store the knick-knacks that are on the upper shelves.

Some day I hope to have a house big enough to have my very own library. My great uncle Donald had a lroom that had been converted to a study that was filled to the brim with books. The house my grandparents lived in when I was little had a real library, with a big fireplace and leather chairs and shelf after shelf of books. I never read any of them, but I loved curling up by the fire in one of the big chairs with my own books. I think sitting by the fire there fostered my love of reading.

In the meantime, I'll continue amassing my collection and hope for a bigger house with more space for bookshelves.