Citizen Reader

One thing I find almost as interesting as reading itself is how and for whom people buy books. As any type of shopping except book-shopping makes me break out in hives, I am solidly in the camp of people who give only two types of presents: books, or cash. As I am also too uncoordinated and color-blind (not really, but I have never understood which colors "go" with other colors) to wrap presents, this works out: books are easy to wrap, and cash only requires a card.

I also have longstanding agreements with most of the people close enough to me to buy me presents, that we needn't buy one another presents. The point of this long, somewhat boring anecdote is that I rarely receive books as gifts. But when I do, they mean something to me, even if I don't like the book. I have a shelf of "gift books" that I have been given and will most likely never give away. This is rare, for me. I have no compunction about getting rid of stuff, even gifted stuff. If you give me a Christmas ornament or other tchotchke the chances are good it will be in the bag of stuff for Goodwill before the year is out. I don't do it to be mean. I do it because I only have one box of Christmas stuff, and I'm going to keep it that way; and I also do it because I hate dusting around knickknacks.

But: the books I keep. Because I love looking at my gift shelf and trying to figure out why the various gifters thought I would enjoy the book given, and further, why I did or did not love the book (and because books are easy to dust). All of that said, I got only one book for Christmas, and it's a keeper: Mr. CR gave me Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote in the accompanying card, "Now you have your very own copy!" It was the perfect gift. (It was also amusing that he borrowed a Christmas card off of me to give back to me.)

I had a wonderful holiday and hope very much you did as well. Did any of you get or give books? Do tell. We're all just killing time at work until the New Year's holiday anyway, aren't we?