Books for Days and Days
We embarked on a major project today. Every year at Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium, we go a little nuttier than normal. We buy books. And not just a few of them either.
It’s understandable really. It’s our annual food book splurge, and the authors are there to sign them specially to us (whether they want to or not). Yes, we buy food books at other times, but never in quite that volume.
Today we did something we’d been avoiding for over a month. We decided to fit our latest purchases (along with other books that were just hanging out) into our food bookshelves. Yes, that’s right. The food bookshelves. Three of them. In our dining room. Pushing into needing a fourth one.
The food bookshelves are not to be confused with the magazine shelves (mostly food magazines) in the office or the bookshelves (one shelf of food-based nonfiction) in our sitting room. You may be seeing a trend here. We like books, but we especially like books about food.
Paul and I are both the sort of people who like to have things organized where we can find them. I may be worse than Paul about some things like clothes (You don’t want to know.), but when it comes to books, we agree. Alphabetized by author or by editor with anthologies with no editor given alphabetized at the end. It’s sad really. I know that. But then we can find things. DVDs? By title unless we have a section that can be sorted by title by a single director. CDs? By artist. Do we have more than we need of all of them? Probably (definitely).
But you can see where trying to fit 15 or so books into three almost-full bookshelves in alphabetical order is a chore. And not a small chore, but a really useful one. We found things we forgot we had. We smiled when we ran into old friends that we hadn’t seen in a while. We saw things that we need to make. We decided that we had books we need to read very soon. We found books that we didn’t remember buying but that looked pretty cool.
We did not count the cookbooks. But I have no doubt at all that we could take one recipe from one book each day and never eat the same thing twice in a year. Don’t judge. There are worse things than cookbooks to hoard. Like cats. We have been assured that we’re not hoarding those as long as there are no more than two cats per person in the house. So we’re ok there.
And yes, the M&Ms have to be sorted by color before we can eat them, and you have to save the blue ones for last because you have to start with the brown ones and work your way through the spectrum from there.