About loving books

My father was an avid reader. He was interested in military history, and had shelves full of books on the subject. In fact, as I was growing up it seemed like there were books everywhere I looked. My parents always made sure we kids had plenty of books with stories to read and pictures to look at. My childhood interest in drawing and painting was stimulated by the illustrations in our books and those I'd check out of the public library.

Over the years, I've accumulated hundreds of books. I think I inherited the tendency to collect them from my dad, and I'll probably go to my death leaving stacks and stacks of unread books behind. In the interest of conserving space, I've started giving away nearly all the books I've read and even more of those I don't expect to. The municipal library gladly recycles them for me via their F.O.L. sales.

Although I have so many unread books, I occasionally enjoy reading favorite books a second or third time. I've read Salem's Lot by Stephen King three times, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. an equal number. I read The Manchurian Candidate twice, the first time when I was in high school and the second last year.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is listed as an exemplar in one of this blog's sidebars, and he's without question at the top of my list of most admired writers. I just finished re-reading his short story collection, Welcome To The Monkey House. I became a Vonnegut junkie in the early seventies, while I was attending BJST in Waco at the dawn of my career in public service employment. I started with a paperback copy of Slaughterhouse Five, chosen at random to help pass the hours in my motel room at night, and was so delighted I quickly bought all his preceding books available in paperback editions and devoured them, too. The beauty of Kurt Vonnegut's writing is that you can move through it rapidly; there's no labor involved, unlike reading, say, columns by George Will or Charles Krauthammer.

Kurt Vonnegut departed this life in April 2007, a few months before I debuted my original blog. In his honor, I'll consider this entry a belated "Scorekeeping" post. It's a sure bet that all my treasured Vonnegut books will remain in the permanent collection.