Reading Rainbow

Tonight my mom and I were in Barnes & Noble, and she was trying to find a book to read. Several of the ones she picked up, I had—and I told her so. So she didn’t buy a book, and I came home and loaded up a bunch of paperbacks (and one hardback) and took them over to her.

I buy books when I am traveling, so a lot of the books I took to her were books I’d bought in an airport, on my way to Boston or on my way home, on my way to Florida or on my way home. I usually buy a book for the return trip, though, because I’m cheap enough to pack a book from home for the going part. I wish I could remember which book goes with which trip—which flight segment, and which part of the country I was flying over (or sitting in) when I read it.

Anyway, it gave me tons of satisfaction to pack up my paperbacks and give them to someone else, someone who will like at least some of them, who wants to read them. It’s part of the reason I like to collect books—I reread them all, of course, but I also like to hand them off to other people—to say, “here, this is good. You will like it.” There’s nothing better than giving someone a book you love, knowing that they’ll love it, too, and then you can talk about how much you both love it.

And here’s the list of books I took to my mom--with where they came from. I didn’t LOVE all of these, but I enjoyed most of them, and I intend to get them back. So if you want one, let me know.

All He Ever Wanted—Anita Shreve (some flight home from somewhere)
The Amateur Marriage—Ann Tyler (I had this book with me in Boston in May 2005, but I can't remember if that's the first time I read it).
The Kite Runner—Khaled Hosseini (read on my most recent trip to NYC)
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter—Kim Edwards (read on my way home from NYC)
Middlesex—Jeffrey Eugenides (read in Alberta, Canada in July 2004)
The Namesake—Jhumpa Lahiri (some flight home from somewhere)
A Prayer for Owen Meany—John Irving (read this winter; birthday present)
Three Junes—Julia Glass (some flight home from somewhere)
The Time-Traveler’s Wife—Audrey Niffenegger (some flight home from somewhere)
The Year of Magical Thinking—Joan Didion
(this is an involved story--a Christmas giftcard to B&N, a date, a mix-up . . . and all I got out of it was this book).