When love and abuse go hand in hand

I would honestly rather stick a hot fork in my eye and give it a good twist than deep-clean my home.

But with the likelihood looming that I'll need to sell the house in the very near future, I've been forced to put down the fork, pick up a wine glass, and get to work.

Tuesday night's task involved organizing bookshelves. I was a lit major in college and a voracious reader since age seven, so you might imagine this was a rather daunting task. I kicked off my evening of fun by hauling six huge boxes of books to Goodwill. Then I got to work sorting, organizing, and re-shelving.

Handling every book one by one gave me the rare opportunity to see which books are in pristine condition and which ones look like I put them in the blender:

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano literally crumbled when I picked it up. No surprise there, since it was one of my favorite books all through high school and college. I've read this book hundreds of times, and my love for it shows in the tattered cover and torn pages. I had to handle it very, very gently as I placed it back on the shelf and picked up the little scraps of disintegrated tape that fell off the spine.

These two go even further back in my childhood:

I think I've been lugging around this copy of Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret since 1983 (third grade, for those of you keeping track at home). I must have acquired Katherine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved a year or two later. I probably read each of them at least three dozen times before I sprouted boobs, but they're still in relatively good shape. The books, not the boobs. Well, the boobs are fine, too.

Then there are the treasures I picked up a little later in life:

I was a lit major in college. That means I spent each day straining beneath the weight of several dozen huge, heavy books as I walked to class. Imagine my delight when this one – which weighed approximately 893 pounds – finally broke in half. Genius! I no longer had to drag the entire book everywhere. I could just pack the chunk we were studying at the time. Incidentally, this text was the inspiration for several of the quotes spoken by Malcolm the pirate/literary theologian in Making Waves.

Then you have books that not only show wear, but evidence of where they've been:

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams has been one of my all-time favorite books since college. As you can see from the note on the cover, I loan it out from time to time. It always comes back to me, often with the friend's gushing praise and a vow to go out and buy more of Kingsolver's books. A wise idea, I must say.

Of course, if you want to see my true passion in reading material, you need to fix your eyes on the middle shelves of the bookcase:

That's a small portion of my romantic comedy stash, and it's heavy on Jennifer Crusie, Kristan Higgins, Victoria Dahl, Lani Diane Rich, and Susan Elizabeth Phillips. You'll notice many of the books are in surprisingly good shape. That's not because I haven't read them much. On the contrary, I've developed the habit of giving these books to friends and then buying new copies for myself. Inevitably, I reread my new copy once or twice before passing it along to yet another friend (thereby creating a new romantic comedy fan-girl and a need for me to go out and buy another new copy for myself).

So what's on your bookshelf? What shows signs of love and abuse, and what are you ashamed to admit you've handled only when shoving it on the shelf to collect dust? Please share!

And please join me in lifting a glass to celebrate the beauty of my well-organized bookshelves!

Now who wants to help organize the garage?