Over the top

The sweater continues apace, both sleeves, half way done. I'm making really good time. One of the ladies at knitting had a couple of new books with her, and somewhere along the line, I mentioned that I input my whole library of craftiness in Library Thing

With just the crafting part of my library recorded, I am halfway to my book limit. You can see my library by clicking the Library Thing Tag in my sidebar. As you see, there really are a few general categories of craftiness. All of them have to do with string things.

Well almost all. I seem to have quite a few about miniatures, and there are a few unusual books of a historical nature that show up too. They are in that part of my library because they are used by me, for inspiration to knit, to embroider. But this is just one small part of my personal library. It is after all, just a mere two shelves of my books.

The next collection that I am considering adding is my cookbooks. There are so many of these I forget sometimes, which ones I have. At last count there are 60. I think I stopped counting about then, I might have been counting wrong, there was, after all wine involved and the numbers were highter than 2 (always bad for accuracy). After the cookbooks, I would have to buy more Library thing space.

The rest is a kind of an amorphous pile of stuff, but it a really big pile of stuff.

There is a lot of history, British history in particular. I became fascinated by English history as a child reading the old Book of Knowledge that my dad bought. It was a treasure trove of thinking, seeing and doing. It was an introduction into art and literature, and oh so many avenues of reading. I have those books right now, though at some point in the near future, they will go to my nephew Aaron, who loves them as much as I do.

There are a lot of the classics of literature. Somewhere along the line, I picked up 3 different editions of Chaucer (I really do need Library Thing), I have a whole range of books written by some of the earliest novelists, and a few of the newer modern literature gems.

There are some seriously fine biography's and some that others would not quite class as biographical in nature, but they are that to me.

I have many many novels best described as popular fiction. Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Helen MacInnis, Agatha Christie, Edward Rutherford, and a whole bunch more. If I sat down and thought about it, there is a fair bit of stuff that falls into this category by writers who are not nearly so well known as these top sellers. OK, I just looked, its two shelves, two books deep. More than a 'bit' now that I think about it.

And then I have what would be best described as ... ... ... romance novels. The fat ones. With all the racy scenes. But most of these that I still keep, I really do keep for the stories. If they took out the racy bits, some of them were good entertainment. Take LaVyrle Spencer. A really good writer, not great but really good. One of her last books, 'Then Came Heaven', is one of the finest pictures of small town North American life ever written.

I have a huge and ancient collection of Harlequins (which really are an entire class all by themselves). I know. Not classy, you could not buy other books in our very small town, and the library was not open every day of the week. If you read everything you had from there and the school library, and it was a Saturday morning, and you were after all working just down the street and from there had to go babysit, what else was a girl to do? It was the time before all night TV and VHS, and you had to entertain yourself somehow and I did a lot of babysitting. You bought what you could get your hands on and you read. That's what you did.

Anyway, suffice it to say, I have a lot of books. I don't know if it is a library to be proud of, or to shout to the world about it, but just like string things, books have always been there, solid, quiet, carrying all the dreams of a small town girl, who sometimes felt like no one else could hear all the stories inside her head.