"Let's Play Library"

Playing "Library" was one of my pastimes over the weekend. The weather has been abysmal. Hot and disgustingly humid--even a walk at a slow pace leaves us dripping and soaked through. And it keeps raining from time to time. The long-range weather forecast is only reservedly hopeful for the future, as in maybe late this week. Fortunately air-conditioning makes indoor life tolerable.

So back to "Let's Play Library." On my older brother's vacations home from school, we would play this game in foul weather, or whenever we had a spare couple of hours. Doug had scads of books. Many of his books were at college with him, but he kept lots of bookshelves full at home as well. Yes, he was an English major. And after that, he got his masters in English and American Lit.

I raided his bookshelves constantly. That's where I found A.J. Cronin's novel The Citadel, about an idealistic young doctor braving the medical establishment (oh, I loved this book!), Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell's 1984, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, lots of Dostoyevsky, The Stranger by Camus. I can see those shelves before me now.  I loved most of the books I read, and puzzled over parts of most of them, because I wasn't reading them as part of a class and I had no one to answer my questions. And because the Internet was decades away from being public, I just tried to figure the books out on my own, which was fine with me.

How to "Play Library:" Don't use us as models, but we would move books from shelf to shelf, from bookcase to bookcase, according to a never-endingly whimsical variety of semi-organization. Doug would talk about the books and then put aside the ones he thought I would like. We talked about the ones I had read in his absence. It was a literary mentorship, for certain. He was five and a half years older, and I took his words about literature as gospel. 

So foul weather upon me in 2013, I pruned and weeded and reshelved and literally gasped when I found book upon book that I must read, all of them nearly forgotten. How does that happen? So for that reason alone, I'm so glad I decided to play. I must confess I was just a tad lonely without a bookish companion to help me make decisions, but most of the time I was overwhelmed by the fact that I have too many reading interests. Yes, I'm a Reader LOST in her Wilderness of Books!

Do you Play Library too? Do tell!