Still moving in

Will it ever end? For weeks we had been keeping a particularly huge bookshelf of the unpainted pine variety on its side in the sunroom, under the impression that it would not fit when placed in a standing sort of way. I tried to tip it up vertical-like, and it wouldn't go. Pythagoras, hypoteneuse, etc. But when measuring it for a posting on craigslist, we discovered - gasp - that it was lower than the ceiling. It is now full of books.

Our book collection seems, like many of our friends, to have been made more fecund by our trip to Spain. I cannot fathom how we acquired, read, and then decided to keep, box, and move all these damn books. Books should be mailed to you every Sunday like the newspaper, and then recycled. In the course of deciding, for what must be the 100th time in the Dan and Leah era, which books would go to the Salvation Army, I went on a little trip down a literary memory lane. I am not a good unpacker.

Nearly all the books I had to buy about teaching for one class or another have now been purged from the collection. I found a couple that were written - not all that well, I might add - by the professors. The price tag on one read $18.00. It takes a lot of gall, I think, to charge eighteen bucks for your own book about observing teachers in Syracuse and then force people to buy it if they want to do well in a required course.

Also, there's the subject of Anne Lamott. You think this web page is a little navel-gazey? At least I spare you the holistic teachings and explicit lecturing. If Anne Lamott didn't exist, there would be nothing at all for Anne Lamott to write about. I mean...you know what I mean. I did not buy these books, nor did I finish them, but 30 pages of a few different ones is enough for this review. Leah has made better choices. Yet Anne Lamott stays on the shelf, because, like in cards, it is better to have many books that match than lots of different books. In this sense, you can only judge a book by its cover, at least inasmuch as that's where the author's name is. So Hemingway stays, Richard Ford stays, Lamott stays, E.B. White stays, but Chinua Achebe goes. Russell Banks stays, Melissa Banks goes. Ursula Hegi and Ursula Duba stay, next to each other, because, I mean, Ursula. Raymond Carver stays. Jon Krakauer stays (how did that happen?). Rigoberta Menchu goes, that liar.

All of this is to say that I prefer unpacking to looking for more jobs.