Books

E is segueing from picture books to chapter books at bedtime. S still reads her picture books when it’s his turn, and she occasionally wants me to read her one too, but for the most part, she and I, after a brief flirtation with Little House in the Big Woods, have settled in with All-of-a-Kind Family. [I prefer to link to Powell’s on principle, but Amazon has a much better description in this case.]

I don’t know why the All-of-a-Kind Family books don’t get more attention. Maybe they, whoever they may be, don’t think that five Jewish immigrant sisters growing up in the Lower East Side at the beginning of the last century have universal appeal. But now that the Betsy-Tacy books are back in vogue, maybe Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertie will be the next big thing.

There’s a lot I could say about the books: how well I remember them, as I reread them to my daughters; how we actually found chocolate babies in a general store in Vermont and bit off their heads, just like Charlotte and Gertie do; how M reads them over and over; how E carries the book around with her and “reads” it, coming up with her own elaborate plots (usually involving Mama giving birth to some assortment of the girls).

But what I keep thinking about is the chapter where the girls visit Papa at his basement junk shop. It’s a rainy day, and all the peddlers are hanging out in the shop, including Charlie, the young, blond, mysterious one whom Ella adores. When the girls arrive, Papa tells them that he has just received a shipment of books and they can have any they want before he sells the rest for scrap. With Charlie’s help, they find a book of fairy tales, a book about dolls, and a complete set of Dickens. They’re ecstatic. The very first chapter of the book is about the girls’ Friday afternoon visit to the library, the most important event of their week. To own their own books thrills them beyond our comprehension.

We finish the chapter and I look around E’s room. The books are spilling out of a small wooden crate and a basket. Our next household purchase needs to be a bigger bookcase for M to adequately house her piles of books (and I mean piles, three of them, towering and teetering and falling over every time she pulls one out, which is frequently, as she returns to her favorites daily). There’s a pile on my dresser (Books To Be Read), one on my bedside table (Books Being Read), and another on S’s. Downstairs, the piles are on the bookshelves themselves, in front of the old books that already have respectable, alphabetized homes. When we put all the picture books away, we can barely wedge them in, and the cookbooks are on strike for additional shelf space.

There isn’t really a moral to this story. Just, I suppose, that we’re lucky to have so many books. And that I should stop complaining about the catastrophic clutter and enjoy them.