Diane, if it's any consolation, we just unpacked the last of our boxes from the move. We moved in here in June... of 2001.
The last set of boxes were books; I looked at all the volumes, especially genre books, with an eye for what to donate, and ended up with three full boxes. Truth is, I could have sifted out more novels I'll never read again, but the books themselves: the pictures on the jackets, the fonts on the spine, even the weight of them, bring back memories of the stories inside and I couldn't part with them quite yet. Maybe next year.
Sadly, one of the reasons I'll never reread a lot of the paperbacks I once loved? The pages are brittle and yellowing around the edges. I'm sorry, but this is impossible. I remember pulling down paperbacks from my father's shelves when I was a teenager, Asimov novels and books by Heinlein, with the fifties-style futuristic covers. The pages were a creamy yellow and they crackled as I turned them. I read carefully, afraid the books would disintegrate in my hands. I expected that; after all, those books were published before I was born. But now? I bought these books myself. In bookstores. Brand new. How can I possibly be old enough for them to be yellow?
Posted by Tamar at October 19, 2003 11:48 PM