Crates and Sheds

For those of you keeping score, I'm at least a dozen books behind in my minireview project.  I say "at least" because my books have been relegated to a storage shed in Wake Forest, North Carolina.  Not all of them; in fact, the finished but not yet reviewed books are in a plastic blue crate in the bedroom of our temporary residence.  Before I'm able to resume my minireview project, I'll have to finish my book extraction and organization project, and I'm sure you'll understand when I say that there are at least a dozen other projects clogging up the "to do" list right now, including job hunting, baby classes, and house finding, not necessarily in that order.

I already miss my books,their familiar spines my favorite wallpaper.  I miss being able to pull one down at random, dust away the months of sitting idle on the shelf, comb away the dog hair before opening it to a random page.  Or just the ability to stare at them from the comfort of my couch, one book in hand, as if showing it where it will live one day.

I watched as the movers pulled the cheap, Home Depot boxes from the truck.  Corners creased, middles folded, tops missing or flattened.  One of the movers commented, "You sho have enough books."  "Kinda my job," I responded.  Lied.  Figured it would make these guys understand that I don't read just for the fun of it.  It's work.  After all, how weird would it be to be talking to a guy who actually reads for the hell of it?

As far as I could tell, all of my books made it, stayed in their boxes, except for one: Camus's The Stranger.  The Stranger, the Outsider.  Maybe that's a sign that I need to reacquaint myself with my masculine side.  I stuck the paperback in my back pocket and brought it home, if home is a blue plastic crate.  Now it mixes with the books I've just finished reading--Lisa Carver's wonderful Drugs Are Nice (thanks Soft Skull) and Ron Rash's The World Made Straight--and with the books, too many to mention, that I still need to read.

I'll get around to reading them, minireviewing them, organizing them.  I can hardly wait.