Confessions Of A Book Hoarder
My Little Free Library Obsession
I read more during the pandemic than I have in years. I blasted through Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone In The Dark and devoured A Moveable Feast — a collection of essays by an array of re-known travel writers, chefs, and food lovers and critics — including Anthony Bourdain and Pico Iyer.
I reread A Handmaid’s Tale and A Confederacy Of Dunces. I found inspiration in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and had my brain stimulated by Chuck Klosterman’s I Wear The Black Hat.
My daughter gifted me with Barrack Obama’s memoir for Christmas. Six months later, I’m still kind of stuck at the half-way mark. (To be honest, I find Barrack’s memoir a bit of a slog. It makes my brain hurt. Don’t get me wrong — he’s a brilliant writer — but he’s no Michelle. She’s way more fun to read. I finished her book in a heartbeat.)
Despite all the reading I’ve done, it seems I’ve hardly made a dent in the stack of books on my nightstand. The perpetual pile up of publications on my bedside table is totally out of control.
Currently, there are twenty-two books awaiting my attention; essay collections, fiction, non-fiction, anthologies, and biographies. This never-ending literary stack of mine is almost entirely due to my uncontrollable propensity to pilfer books from every free standing neighborhood pop-up library I encounter.
There are five (FIVE!) Little Free Libraries along my first dog walking route of the day; two of them are on the same street. Four of them popped up sometime during the worst of the pandemic, which makes sense, I mean, what else were folks supposed to do during the shut down?
There’s the little free library on the corner of Mulholland and Woodrow Wilson, which I drive past en route to my second dog walk and, about ninety minutes after that, I cruise by the one on Berry Drive. If any one of these libraries appear to have been restocked with new material, I immediately pull over.
If I were to guess, I yield about one, maybe two, books a week. Then again, I might not indulge my book addiction for weeks. It all depends. There are several occasions when a library is chock full of books that don’t pique my interest at all. Sometimes, it’s a veritable book bonanza.
Occasionally, I’ll find forgotten souvenirs tucked inside a book’s pages that offer tiny clues into the mysterious goings-on of the book’s previous owner.
Some things I’ve found:
Here’s the thing with these little libraries, though. Ideally, if you take a book, you’re supposed to leave a book, you know, kinda like an exchange program. I am terribly ashamed to admit that I take without ever leaving. I mean, I haven’t even finished the books I’ve already got and, yet, if I see something in a little library that interests me, I grab it, which, I suppose, one could argue, makes me a no-good hoarder of books, but I’d rather think of myself as an insatiable lover of books who just can’t resist a good little library.
