Recently, while cleaning out the last remnants of my wife’s stuff in the dark recesses of her mother’s house, I ran across Winston Churchill’s four volume roller coaster through British history titled A History of the English Speaking Peoples. Needless to say, something (or more precisely four somethings) that moments earlier I didn’t know we owned I suddenly couldn’t imagine my life without. Books have this amazing power over me that I’m trying to overcome for the sake of my friends the next time we move. The funny thing about the books I own is that I rarely read them. They are kind of like Mt. Tabor Park, which is right up the street. Why would I go there? What’s the point? I could go there anytime. I wouldn’t want to get bored of the place, after all. So books languish on my shelves and in boxes, condemned to a life of lonely immobility because the interesting title or famous author’s name printed on the spine casts a spell on me, rendering me unable to send it along to someone who might read it.
The good news is that I’m beginning to struggle upstream against this pernicious tendency. I realized as I stood there, stroking one of the majestic volumes, that all that was necessary to break its spell on me was that I read it. So I strapped on my tennis shoes and headed up to Tabor for some exercise...metaphorically of course.
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