Books

One of my favorite quotes is from Surprised by Joy as C.S. Lewis describes the home in which he grew up. The book is subtitled "The Shape of My Early Life." If you have never read it, put it on your list for the fall when you can curl up in your favorite reading chair with it and a huge cup of tea. That's how I read it a couple of years ago. C.S. Lewis is a kindred spirit. What's a house without a lot of books?

"I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and noise of wind under the tiles. And, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass."