Scamming For Books

Right. Start a blog and don't post for five weeks. Good beginning.

So, the hollandaise are over, and I did have some quality time off. I read a lot, drank a bit (which I do rarely, so it was unusual, but fun) watched the 1995 BBC version of Pride & Prejudice (um, Colin Firth--no words) again, and generally was not terribly productive.

But I do have a few stories to tell. And books to talk about.

Let me confess: I have a completely unrealistic approach to books. I buy them.

My first book scam happened when I was about eight. In Miss Loeb's third-grade classroom, we received a couple of flyers for books--from Weekly Reader, I think, and some other place. I quickly found 10 or 12 books I wanted from one catalog, and something like 11 from the other. What to do?

At lunch I walked home, where my dad met me between his classes and I asked if I could place a book order. He readily agreed. That night I whipped out the other catalog and asked my mother if I could place a book order, to which she readily agreed.

When they compared notes, they asked, with apparent sincerity, "Did you just forget?." and . . . I readily agreed, with appropriate sheepishness. To their credit, they laughed indulgently, and my addiction took root.

My comeuppance, of course, turned out to be when both shipments arrived on the same day and I had to figure out how to carry 23 books (pre-backpack days, heh) three blocks.

I managed.

Some of that self-justification comes back when I happen to miss the door at work (I'm the office manager) and someone else winds up stacking five or six or maybe even eight Amazon packages next to my desk. Sometimes I even feel the need to explain: oh, I signed up for their rapid shipping program for one annual fee, and so they split orders and ship them from different locations.

yeah, as if anyone cares.

Now I also make sure to always have a sturdy bag on hand. Check out Envirosax.com--my new favorite, good for hauling all sorts of stuff.

oh, and it only cements my thought that it really wasn't much of a scam when I remember that the total for the two orders was something like $21. Yeah, okay, it was 1966, but still.

I can still remember the feeling of cracking open those wonderful paperbacks: Martha's Secret Wish, about a girl with a widowed mother who adopts a lively stray dachshund only to have his owner rediscover him at a street fair six months later. Yes, a happy ending for all followed. The Encyclopedia Brown series, about the smart and endearing boy detective. Two books (titles are lost to me now) about a girl named Katie John, who starts a war between the girls and boys in her class (something that would shortly happen in my own fifth grade) and who is viciously attacked in a "slam book" that circulates: her heart breaks when she sees a message from her buddy, a boy she'd spent long summer days with on all sorts of adventures, saying simply, "Whatever happened to Explorer Katie?" Again, I would soon see some really awful things written about me in just such a book.

It's not that I didn't use the library--I did. The Beany Malone books, about a motherless teenager from a large family living in Denver after World War II. (That entire series has been reissued and I'm seriously considering dropping 150 bucks for all 12 books). Classic Nancy Drew, in beat-up editions from the '40's, that my mother nabbed at a library sale. Madeline L'Engle's mysterious and troubling A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. For a while I even worked my way around Blackstone Library alphabetically, which is how I read a YA novel about the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey, sparking a fascination with British history that continues. An unfortunate stretch of a truly terrible series from the '50's, I guess, called Modern Career Romances, with titles like Sondra, Surgical Nurse. Need I say that Sondra and her buds always got their man in the final chapter?

A lovely novel called Up A Road Slowly, about ten years in the life of young Julie, beginning when she goes to live with h/er Aunt Cordelia ["spinster" is implied, always] following her mother's death. She learns many lessons from many imperfect people: her brilliant but rigid aunt, her alcoholic uncle, who claims to be working on his "magnum opus" novel and will be until his liver betrays him. Many years later I actually lifted a copy of this book from my high school library (I prostrate myself in penance) and I've re-read it every ten years or so since.

Sometimes, I would say to my mother, "Do you have anything I can read?" and over time she put A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Steinbeck's Travels With Charley in my hands. The first would shape much of my view of storytelling even to now, and the last would spark my love of all things Steinbeck as well as bloom a little thought: all the stories I made up in my own head, maybe if I wrote them down, I could be a writer like him and have all the time in the world to take long trips with my dog (well, cat).

So, yes, I own too many books. Probably more than I could read in my lifetime, although I'm not ready to admit it, yet. I will be purging a bunch of stuff within the next couple of months (I'm never going to read Margaret Drabble, and there are four or five among The Great Unread) and donate a lot of them (friends will get first grab) to a great project in Chicago: Open Books, a used bookstore opening this year, where all the profits will fund literacy projects.

Best of all, they do all the heavy lifting--I don't even have to supply the carry-alls.