Book People

While I'm in Portland, I've been staying with my sister. She has a lot of books. 

She works in the library, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she has a lot of books. All kinds of books. You can find Winnie the Pooh sitting happily next to Vanity Fair and All's Quiet on the Western Front.

Every day, she hands me a new book and tells me that I just have to read it. I've only been here a few weeks and I have a pretty big stack of books to work my way through. I've had to cut back on my sleeping hours just to keep up with my reading assignments. 

It is quite the eclectic assortment of books that she has given me. A few with a Cleveland connection (where we grew up), some graphic novels (who knew you could learn about the Iranian revolution through what is essentially a comic book), some YA, a "bonnet lit" book (think Amish, think romance, think bizarre), a book about North Dakota (where Scott grew up) and one about whaling wives (we come from whaling people). 

She got really excited when she handed me this book by Anne Fadiman and even read me a passage out loud.

It was from an essay about proofreading. The Fadiman family are self-described "compulsive proofreaders". So are my mother and sister. These are the types of people who send letters to newspapers, shops and restaurants to advise them that they've put an apostrophe in the wrong place. Clearly, I didn't get the grammar gene. Which you probably already know if you've spent any amount of time reading this blog. 

Fortunately, I like books otherwise I would have been excommunicated from the family when I was 5 or 6 years old due to my appalling lack of interest in grammar.

Just to prove I am a book person, here are some of the books in my collection. You may notice a theme.

I just bought Jimmy Cornell's World Cruising Routes at Powell's Books in Portland. Powell's is the biggest independent new and used bookstore in the world. If you are a book person, you probably know that already. It made CNN's list of coolest bookstores in the world. 

I showed my mother and sister Jimmy Cornell's book. It has all sorts of useful information about 1,000 cruising routes from the South Seas to the Arctic. My mother's reaction - "I forbid you from sailing across an ocean." You get a similar sort of reaction if you mention motorcycles - "I forbid you from riding a motorcycle." Whenever she sees pictures of Scott and me on motorcycles or mopeds, I just tell her it is a stunt double. My sister, on the other hand, could care less if we cross an ocean. She is just interested in when we'll be docked in Cuba so that she can come visit.

I've been trying to share my books with my sister, but so far she doesn't seem too interested. Her cat on the other hand is fascinated with Lin Pardey's The Care and Feeding of Sailing Crew. If you know anything about cats, you'll know that all they care about is when their next meal is so this book is right up her alley.

Even the cats in our family are book people. They could care less about grammar though.

{If you see any spelling or grammar errors in this blog post, please feel free to email my mother and sister. They'll be delighted to bring them to my attention on your behalf.}

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