I got Love in the Time of Cholera out of the library (I know – I need to do another library haul photo soon). It’s the Knopf 1988 hard-cover publication (because my library has many older books) and I’m reading it and thinking “Did anyone at Knopf actually want me to read this book?” The book is slightly too large and too heavy to hold comfortably, there doesn’t seem to be any care taken with cover design, and worst of all, the font: it’s some sort of dingy font that looks typewritten and smudged with thin margins that is a pain in the ass to read. Did no one design books in the 1980s? Reading a poorly designed book is tedious, no matter how enthusiastic I am about the content.

Don’t even get me started on how poorly arranged some professionally published e-books are.

I was invited to my first ever bastion of the thirty/forty something women this month – a book club! I was super excited because I am not good at meeting people or putting myself out there and this was a commitment to do both. Then I didn’t realise the book club was in the afternoon rather than the evening and missed it, which is pretty much par for the course for me. Let’s just say when I told Geoff, he wasn’t surprised. Hopefully I will be more on-the-ball for book club meeting number two.

I have a lot of books.

Sometimes I think, maybe I don’t have that many. Five Billy bookcases full plus miscellany spread out around the house plus the two books lent to Neil (I remember you have them Neil!) doesn’t seem like too many. Then the insurance agent comes over to verify our policy and takes photographs of the books because, in his words, normal people don’t have so many books and if there was an insurance claim, he wanted them to believe me.

I see those pictures where people have arranged their books by colour. I thought I should arrange my books by colour too and looked at my shelf, only to realize how impossible that is. People who arrange their books by colour seem to have unicoloured books in which this is an easy task. I have books with multiple colours on their spines. Then there are the titles, authors, publishers, etc. written there, disrupting the chromatic flow. So I didn’t arrange my books by colour. I just left them haphazard on the shelf in such a way that I am always convinced I am missing some book and then have to spend twenty minutes going shelf by shelf trying to find it.

I think I should give my books away. I have a lot. Maybe having isn’t so great. I don’t know. Today they just sit there and make me feel heavy.

Last week I read Tenth of December and after all the great reviews (The Best Book You’ll Read This Year), I expected to be blown away. I expected that I would be buying this book for all my reading friends and talking about how much I loved it. I expected magnificientness. And is the book good: yes. Is it great? Maybe. Was it the best book I read this year? No (that’s probably a tie so far between HHhH and The Bean Trees, neither of which was published in 2013).

You know what short story book blew me away? What Boys Like by Amy Jones. After I finished Tenth of December, I sat thinking why don’t more people know What Boys Like? Those short stories are amazing. Then, amusingly, Salty Ink the next day talked about how amazing What Boys Like is. I follow Amy Jones on twitter. Her twitter personality was not what I expected, but that’s okay too.

So go read Tenth of December. Then go read What Boys Like, which is better.

It’s strange sometimes the books that Tesfa attaches herself to. There are the obvious ones, the Robert Munsch’s and the Dr. Seuss’s and the Margaret and H.A. Rey’s, but then there are the lesser known books. One of Tesfa’s all-time favourite books is Doggie in the Window, which is a book I randomly picked up at an Ottawa Public Library used book sale. It goes in and out of favour a bit, but if ever stumped for what to read Tesfa, I can pick this one off the shelf and she never objects.

There were three lesser known books I remember vividly from my childhood: Henri and the Loup Garou, Fabulous Animal Facts That Hardly Anyone Knows, and Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, the last of which is the only one still in print. We have copies of all three. Henri and the Loup Garou I bought from alibris when Tesfa was small, Fabulous Animal Facts I still have my copy from when I was little, and Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb my mother bought for Tesfa when Tesfa was a few weeks old. Of the three, Tesfa has really only taken to Fabulous Animal Facts.

Why some books and not others? I wish I knew. I think if I could figure out what about these books stuck with me, it would tell me something about my brain. I’m always interested in memory, the malleability of it, the fallibility of it. I’m reading Proust right now. Maybe that will help.

So let’s have some book confessions.

• I have never read anything by Jane Austen. The closest is that I did read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I’ve watched Bride and Prejudice (and I guess I’ve seen Clueless and read Bridget Jones), but to actually read books about people whose sole purpose is getting married and/or being pithily polite to one another leaves me cold.
• I took a year of Russian literature in university, which means I’ve read some Russian books. Okay, I’ve read a lot of Russian books (in translation as my knowledge of Russian involves me being able to introduce myself, identify myself as Canadian and a mathematician, tell people how much I love the Russian language, count to ten, then say I don’t understand). But what I haven’t read, not one word of, is Chekhov. Now my bookshelves are dotted with plays by Chekhov and short story collections by Chekhov and short story collections with a variety of authors including Chekhov. In fact, I often look at my bookshelves and think “I should really gather all the books that have some piece of Chekhov in them and get rid of any duplicates” but I don’t because then maybe I would read something by Chekhov and feel stupid that I’ve waited so long to do so.
• Every few months, Geoff and I have this conversation:
  
  Geoff: You remember [insert scene from The Trial or The Castle or The Metamorphosis or something by Kafka]?
  
  Me: I have never read Kafka.
  
  Geoff: What? You’ve never read Kafka?
  
  Me: Nope.
  
  Geoff: How can you have not read Kafka? Here, I will find you some books by Kafka for you to read.
  
  Usually he doesn’t actually bother so I still haven’t read Kafka.
• I am a female Canadian who wants to write literary fiction. This does not mean that I have read The Handmaids Tale. All is not lost. I own it, which is the first step to reading it.

There are some other grievous book gaps in my knowledge, but on this cloudy Monday, these are the only ones I am willing to own up to.