TheBanyanTree: Reading

[Monique Colver]

My stepmother, charming as she was, had very definite ideas of how everyone
else should behave and live and breathe and procreate (or not -- I shall
forever be labeled "the selfish one" for not having children) and decorate
and clean and talk and entertain and she knew best about everything. You
could ask her, and she'd confirm that. Well, you can't really ask her,
because she's dead, but if you could, she would. For decorating, she liked
metal sculptures on the wall, or objects from Tijuana, or objets d'art
picked up from various places that didn't sell such things. Books were not
to be seen because they interfered with her notions of "class," though I
think it was rather that she couldn't understand them. I know she hated it
when I knew something she didn't, which happened more and more often once I
learned how to, uhm, read . . .

That's not entirely true. I already knew how to read when she showed up and
was already smarter than she was. I was 10.

So her decorating plan worked fine for her. I had no problem with it. And
the same with anyone else. You are all free to decorate, embellish, equip,
furnish, etc your dwelling, abode, house, condo however you wish, and I
think it's just fine. What I think is really gauche is deciding what is
acceptable and what is not. That annoys me. Who gets to be the decider,
anyway?

I myself have a couple of first editions that I haven't read, I just like to
have them. My stepmother would have thrown them out for being old. I don't
really care. I think part of her problem with my bookshelves full of books
that were fiction, history, science, social science was that she didn't
understand why I would read those, and she felt that I was just showing off
my superior intellect.

But the thing with a superior intellect is that one doesn't have to show it
off.

Or so I'm guessing, were I to have one.


Monique Colver




On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 1:18 PM, auntiesash <auntiesash at gmail.com> wrote:

> I dunno.  I have a couple of really beautiful old books that I will never
> read and think are lovely, so those are just decorations.  Some end papers
> are stunning, and the embossing or color choices are amazing.  I think
> books
> can be incredibly decorative.  That's not why I buy books and, when you
> have
> heaps and stacks of them, they may lose their decorative advantage, but if
> people wanna buy books cause they are pretty, I don't see anything wrong
> with that.  I bet the books' authors and publishers are ok with it too.
>
> And maybe, if they don't read the books, someone else will wander through
> and read them??
>
>
>
> On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Laura <wolfljsh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 1:34 PM, Monique Colver <
> monique.colver at gmail.com
> > >wrote:
> >
> > > She told me once that people who "decorated
> > > with books" were . . . I don't remember exactly, but it had something
> to
> > do
> > > with being gauche and unfit for society. This after she'd visited my
> > house,
> > > which had bookshelves in, of all places, the living room. I never
> > > considered
> > > it "decorating with books," I thought it was "having books," and they
> had
> > > to
> > > go somewhere, didn't they?
> > >
> >
> > I must say, I agree with your stepmother.  People who buy books to
> decorate
> > with are gauche.  People who buy bookshelves to store their books are not
> > gauche.  I have ... good grief, I don't even *know* how many shelves full
> > of
> > books I have!  But I don't decorate with them, they are storage units.
>  In
> > fact, I'm pretty sure nobody would accuse my piles of mis-matched,
> > non-colour coordinated, shelved by genre, books, of being decorative.  :)
> >
> > --
> > Laura
> > wolfljsh at gmail.com
> > wolfsinger at insightbb.com
> >
>
>
>