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| Some Kent books... Click photos to enlarge. |
"We read to learn how to write."
Avoiding my taxes and book revisions, I roamed my house this early morning taking photos of the stacks, rows, piles, and clumps of books that line my tables, shelves, desks, and piano. Some of the books I've read; some I haven't. Some are hand-me-downs from my grandfather, F. Allen Burt; others are in storage for Ken, my brother-in-law, a dyed-in-the-wool bibliophile. A select few come from my graduate school studies--those books have been read multiple times, the pages are dog-eared, sticky-noted, Post-It'd, and scribbled on. I feel smart when I see those books, except when I remember how often I sat staring at the dense writing, reading it over and over again, puzzled, left wondering.
Hundreds of my books come from my old high school English classroom, Room 109 of Mountain Valley High School. There, my students and I collected 2500+ books for our classroom library. In fact, my students got extra credit once a quarter for donating a book! (Yes, I could be bought, but only with books.) In Room 109, we had every-anything in our stacks, from The Basketball Diaries and When Someone You Know Is Gay to How Cars Work and a book on forensics with a full-blown autopsy report and detailed photographs.
John Steinbeck said, "I guess there are never enough books." This morning, I’d agree. Time to get to work.
