It breaks my heart, but it's official. My husband and I are leaving western Massachusetts. Steve is nearly done with his PhD and due to various circumstances that I won't bore you with here, we have to move. So, it's off to coastal Maine for the Fall to live with my folks where I'll spend my days taking care of and reading to my 3 1/2 month old daughter, Molly, and watching the leaves turn those beautiful shades of orange and red that New England falls are so famous for. That's not so terrible, right?
Sadly, what is terrible is that most of our belongings are going to go into storage and I have to:
a) get rid of books I know I'll never read. (I've never given away a book before. This is all new to me. I'm scared.)
and
b) I can only take 25 books with me to Maine.
This is a terrifying prospect for me. What if I choose the wrong books? What if I bring Laurie Sheck's A Monster's Note, but what I really want to read that week is the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories and I packed it away?! No, I really do want to read A Monster's Note, so that won't happen, but you know what I mean. This is really my version of "If I Was Stranded on a Desert Island." So, dear reader, if you were forced to chose only a few books out of at least a thousand you know you wanted to read, what would you bring? How would you decide? I'll take any advice.
Emily Russo Murtagh
1 comment:
That's a tough one. Are you serious about the only 25 books?
If I were faced with that choice, I'd pick at least a few titles that I love and want to read again & again. For me that would probably be Pride & Prejudice and The Lord of the Rings.
Then I'd search for the biggest honkin' 23 works of literary fiction that I could find, so that they'd last a long time.
Good luck with the winnowing. And I really wish you didn't have to leave. :(
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