A Good Day [Man and Bits of Paper]

When I got home for Thanksgiving my parents too seemed to have caught the cleaning bug. The house was a lot emptier, a lot more serene, than it had been. My early christmas gift to them, they informed me, was to be the elimination of at least one, hopefully three or four or all, of my boxes of stuff in the garage.

My mind flashed back to packing those very boxes, five years ago. Books, I remembered, lots of books.

A digression: My parents are, shall we say, not poor. They might be rich- they probably are rich- but they don't act rich, and I never grew up thinking we were rich. But they are comfortable, and they do have discretionary income, although I rarely see them spend it.

I have, however, seen them spend it on books. Many times in my childhood would we venture to the bookstore and leave with armfuls.

I was a voracious reader in high school and middle school. In college most of that appetite was channeled towards assigned reading. Looking up now, I have four half-read books on my shelf, and two more in my bag. The habit has definitely stuck.

I think my parents logic went something like this: reading is a very good habit, and something we want to encourage Connor to do. He should probably be reading good books. If he picks his own books, he will pick crap for a while, but eventually he will start picking good books. But giving him good books is not as good as him picking them out himself. To increase the aggregate total of good books read over time, we should let him a) pick his own books, and b) let him pick a lot of books.

Given this, the logical thing to do was to take me and my sister to a bookstore pretty often and let us go nuts. They could, so they did.

And now we find me pulling huge boxes of generally bad but occasionally good science fiction and fantasy out of my garage.

It took less than thirty minutes to sort through three boxes of them. Everything went except for a) five books that were not actually mine and b) a signed copy of the un-utterably terrible Dune: House Harkonnen, kept because of the inscription:

"To Connor, who knows so much about the Dune Universe"

to which I always want to append: "From Brian Herbert, who knows so little about the Dune Universe"

The other two hundred books we took, along with two Ikea bags of books my parents also intended to not own, to a used book store, and sold them.

The store (BookBuyers, which is an awesome place that everyone in the bay area should visit) remaindered a half-box, and took the rest for two thirds store credit, one third cash. We are going to sell the store credit on Craigslist, or maybe the KGB board (all those googlers must love books!)

It was a good day.