Shelf full of stories!!

Whoever said 'moving houses is fun' should be shot..(that will mean me :( straight in the line of fire...) After so many moves, packing , unpacking....throwing away stuff, giving away stuff, hiding toys away(or else, you'll be titled the devil incarnate by your kids, what else?) so you can give it to some one needy...I think I know how much patience I need in the next couple of months..(please pass on all the patience peoples.... )
When you have children who are poles apart when it comes to their 'keep things neat' attitude, your life can be a roller coaster ride.

Well !! I'm now in the process of deciding how to, what to, where to , which to...throw or give away. I havent moved any bit in that direction. But this morning while I was looking around my house...I was petrified. Forget the kids, I have to handle the monster called 'ME' , my space and my umpteen books.

BOOKS ah!!!

You should know that people are divided into readers and non-readers (wow!! what a terribly new insight !! hehe) Readers are split into newspapers and magazines only ( like my husband) and book-readers( like me :D ) Book readers are now further sent into borrow thy book (not me :( ) and buy thy book (ME!!!!!!) .
Now since I've already gone ahead and done the needful of buying the book, I also happen to fall into the category that cares for books as a physical entity.. how much more heavy can that get :(. Those of us who believe that a house without books , is hardly distinguishable from a Sauna or a wigwam. That is why I worry so much about bookshelves and how they are filled.
Should shelves be adjustable, ( ideal, but time consuming) or should they just sit there...any way, no one gets to changing them regularly. (No wonder the set of World books always occupies the same position on any shelf in any house I move into ?? )
Should I keep them clean behind glass or open to eye, the hand and the air????

Should I keep one space entirely for all the books, or should I just populate all the rooms by spreading them out? Should I keep my children's books accordingly in their individual rooms or should I have a common space? What if I start a war because i've kept one reference book in the other room and they don't share?? Am I going to be held responsible for their fights??
I tried by jotting down where i'll need to put them in...and here goes my fanatical thoughts

1. There must be a shelf in the kitchen, for cookery books. (How else do I explain, why I go and buy them, 'cos they looked so beautiful with all the lovely colored prints of exotic dishes, I might never even make. They surely know how to lure me.... Those dairies where half the things written down in varied coloured pens,(with a few phone numbers too) 'cos I just can't let go of my mom's house tastes, but still end up cooking things that my mother-in-law cooked)



2. A small shelf (ok a huge sack maybe!) for those bathrooms. Ok this is tricky I know. Many people who read extensively in the loo ( my husband....yes, yes) , take in their reading (its mostly newspapers, or the magazines that I subscribe to :) ] and take them out again (more or less damp-smudged or folded out of recognition) Maybe I should ask publishers to start 'water proof series for bathroom reading'. But in the present day, clinical ,apartment bathrooms...i'll be glad if I can even hold the book a lil far apart from my nose.



3. The children's room. Civilzed habits need to be taught ;). We were always told not put the book down open on its face, not to make dog ears to mark out pages...must put the books back in their shelf ( my older son does it very religiously...sometimes to the point of frustration...) So should they be , appetizing to look at ( everything should be...if I need my junior-curly-poo to eat), easy to reach and of course well stocked ( their books get read very fast...have to still learn that art )

4. If the husband is lucky enough to have his own space...wherever it maybe..dressing room, bedside, wardrobe...god knows where,he will do reading ( I can sigh a relief here...I just have to go back to point 2. :D His set will most probably, no, surely ,have just some comics...all at the same time in one place, the last weeks newspaper, and yes, the occassional vogue magazine..he needs some eye candy too.




5.Passages and landings ( oh oh...I don't have them...no stairs inside! ) so one down....are for seldom-wanted but can't throw away books. Just because I got it as a consolation prize in my school days or his father gifted it to him when he went away on a trip for the first time...no matter that the book has been read so many time over even by the roaches that were present in some of the houses..







6.Read somewhere that the dining area also makes a good space for books...the dictionary ( so that we can correct our kids stat, and what else do I do with the millions of Oxford dictionaries???...)questions can be answered on the spot...but houses now being so huge that the distance from the dining to the farthest bookshelf in the bedroom could be just a few couple of feet away..I can strike that out, and moreover its always a race to finish meals anyway.



It would be easy to multiply the list of dilemnas with which any normal bookish person faces. But at the end of it all, I know ,The more books are handled and used ( by loving though grubby hands ) the less dusting, artificial attention they need. Neglect a book and it wilts visibly. We all know what that means???



How about this????


But at the end of it all...I would want my house which says 'Come on in' and not 'All hope abandon, ye, who enter here'.