My Home Library

I recently catalogued our home library. This took me weeks of taking books off of shelves, piling them on the couch and typing them into the computer. Only one person could sit on the couch for three weeks and if you did you had to worry about one or two mountains of books falling on you (which would have messed up the (dis)organization I had set up). This is something I have wanted to do for a really long time. A few years ago I read an article called "Our Refined Heavenly Home" by Elder Douglas L. Callister of the Seventy, it was reprinted in the June 2009 Ensign. There were many things in this article that caused me to pause, but because we are such a book loving family, one part especially stuck out



"There was a fine library in the home of President Gordon B. Hinckley's youth (1910-2008). It was not an ostentatious home, but the library contained almost 1000 volumes of the rich literature of the world, and President Hinckley spent his early years immersed in these books"



We have lots of books, at least I thought we had lots of books. When all of the books were listed we have over 500 books, some of which are picture books. I am not sure if there were many picture books in the Hinckley home, but even if there were, my children have only half as many books available to them. I seriously need to work on that.



This year we also got rid of books (this at first seemed a sin to me), but we set a standard in our family of what is an acceptable book and what is not. We defined those that are acceptable as Classics or Living Books. These are books that are worth reading more than once. The ones we got rid of were what we (and Charlotte Mason) call Twaddle. These are books that don't have moral value, didn't inspire us, or were just plain dumb (or dumbed down). I am so glad that we did this, now I know that whenever one of my children picks a book from a shelf she has an opportunity to be inspired and to learn. More importantly they can never be accused of wasting their time just reading.



Along with increasing the number of books we have also made it our goal to replace as many of our favorite paperbacks with hardcover books. I am also having a hard time with this because even though my copy of Jane Eyre is held together with a rubber band and I am so worried about losing pages every time I pull it out, it has all of my notes in it. I guess getting a new copy will just give me the opportunity to re-learn from the book. I will be able to start fresh with, hopefully, a new set of epiphanies. Just writing that makes me want to leave this post and order a new copy from Amazon. As Matthew would say, just put down the keyboard, walk away, and no one will get hurt.