Book learnin'

When I (David) graduated just over a year ago, I had vowed to go an entire year without reading any non-fiction books. In a coincidence of timing, Heather and I realized that my notion of moving the TV room into the basement and converting the sun room into a library was merely a pipe dream of utilitarian harmony (at least for the time being). So instead (or temporarily) I crafted a crude library in the basement. Books were pulled out of the attic and shelved, and comfy reading furniture was installed. Apart from expanding the collection, all that remains is a need for decoration that could mask the coal bin like aesthetics of the ‘reading chamber’. The coincidence of this act is that it occurred a short while ago as my fiction-only fast ended. And before any dust (cat litter debris) could settle on the books, I immediately dove into a crime-ladened memoir. It turns out that there are several-months-reading worth of books that had been given to me during the college days that I had put away until my academic career was over.

Despite the new library housing several books that I know I would never part with, I recently noticed that there is a distinct lack of crown jewels in the collection. Therefore I have decided to make it a goal to get my hands on a vintage collection of tocqueville’s democracy in America

Seeing as how this may well be an easily achievable goal, I thought I might fill shelf space in other ways as well. There is already a small stack of children’s books (including some essential Richard Scarry.) But now the search is on for stories with themes that introduce wee-little-ones to concepts that might otherwise be hard to come by in modern American life. Perhaps something along the lines of a community that successfully sustains itself without the values of "ownership" and/or "individualism". I have a hunch that such stories might be abundant in the world of children’s literature. Once we have access to them, and they’ve been committed to memory after countless bedtime readings, perhaps then it will be easy to reference them as a guiding illustration when we've been led to a perplexed questioning of western culture, after enduring a long string of the "but why?" questions young ones are so renowned for.