Family Binding

In “Anecdotal Tales”, stories will be told. Some will be fun, some will not. Some will be great, some will be less so. Some stories are true, some are merely possible. This is one of them.

Family Binding

“A half-finished book is, after all, a half-finished love affair.” –Cloud Atlas

From Wikipedia.

I come from a family of book people.  It’s just who we are.  Before the world of the internet intervened and we all retreated to our separate laptops, we would all sit around and spend family time with our own individual books.  We don’t take family trips too much, and the small children running around the house tend to sap what energy we have out of us pretty darn quick.  But at some point, someone will yank out a book and we’ll all follow suit.

I try to add a little variety to the group.  Nobody else reads comic books, but I can’t get enough of them.  I don’t read devotional books; I want stories.  In tandem with my love of stories in book form is my appreciation of a good movie.  When I hear that a book is coming to the movie screen, I want to read the book first.

On the one hand, it’s an ego thing.  When the movie finally does come out, I can have bragging rights.  “Oh yeah, I read the book.  Did you?”  This additionally allows the option of spouting a pompous phrase like, “They left out three chapters of the book.”  I have yet to say such things, but I like to know that the possibility exists.

In addition, once you see the movie, it’s almost too late to go back and read the book.  The actors will always be stuck in your head.  (The only exception I’ve come across is Pride and Prejudice, and even then I still had Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle dancing around in my head.)

Tonight I got the e-mail that all true book huggers wait for.  The library wanted to let me know that a copy of Cloud Atlas was waiting for me.  The book is about six hundred pages and the movie comes out just before Halloween, so I had to get a move on.  (If any movie is made with Tom Hanks and Jim Broadbent, I’m forced to see it.  Those two actors cannot be denied.)  That was how I found myself in the local library this evening.  The sooner I had that book in my hands, the sooner I could put the rest of my life on hold.

I walked into the library, made my way to the reserve shelves, and plucked my book off the shelf.  Being the somewhat-considerate brother-in-law that I am, I checked the shelf to see if my relative had her normal stack of books.  I was on my way to babysit my nieces and figured I could save the other family members a trip.  There were no books for them on the shelf, so I assumed she had already been in earlier this week.

I needed to keep my nieces entertained and they like books as much of the rest of us.  I made my way towards the children’s section.  I assumed something worthwhile would jump out at me.  If nothing else, I figured I could inject a little Shel Silverstein into their lives.

Appearing out of nowhere, a small girl with blonde curly hair started running towards me.  It took me by surprise, but this sort of thing has happened to me a few times before.  Her blue eyes wide open; she ran to me in her spring dress and threw her arms around my leg.

“Uncle Phil!”

“I was just on my way to see you guys.”  I was taken aback, but not floored.  This was the third time that I have run across my family in the library.  Book junkies need a fix rather often and the librarians are good at pushing their wares.

Carrying a large cloth bag of books, my sister-in-law approached.  She gave me a little tsk-ing because my phone had been turned off.  She had been trying to offer to pick up my book for me since we were going to see each other.  Great minds think alike.

Instead of blindly guessing what sort of selections I should grab for my nieces, one of them helped picked the stories out with me.  Happily, she agreed that The Missing Piece sounded like an interesting read.  As a matter of fact, she made me read it twice to her tonight.  I tried to talk her out of it.  She wouldn’t have it; the munchkin likes books as much as the rest of us.  There’s no escaping that genetic trait, nor do we plan to.

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