B IS FOR...

B is for books. I thought at first I'd say 'bagels'...or 'babies'...or 'baco...' quick erase that one!!!

Nope, b has to be for books. I love them. I love reading them; I love looking at them; I love talking about them; I love writing them.

It has gotten so bad that I now have 44 books on my shelf waiting to be read...no wait make that 47...I picked up three more this morning when I was in the mall. Sigh...I'm hopeless. I'm like those people you see on television who need an expert to come in and clean up their house because they have collected 135 cats, 722 stuffed animals, old magazines from the time when Time was TIME MAGAZINE.

That's me with books...and with wool but we'll leave that one for another letter.

Here are some of the books I've enjoyed in the past year.
1. Wolf Hall...about Tudor England...the Cromwell's, Cranmers, Katherine the first one, Anne the first one...you know the cast.
2. A Book of Love...about the Borgia's...Lucrecia and Cesare and a little Jewish girl named Esther.
3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...and the other two in the trilogy. Yahoo.
4. Philippa Gregory...all her books...historical fiction...again Henry that devil.
5. Jodi Picoult...any of them.
6. Daniel Silva...any of them!!!
7. The Little Book...Seldon Edwards
8. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society...Juliet Ashton
9.The Help...Katherine Stockett
10. Water for Elephants and Ape House...Sarah Gruen
11.A Thousand Splendid Suns...Khaled Hossieni...I did not like The Kite Runner :)
12.and the list goes on...
Here are some of the books on my shelf waiting to be read:
Where the Crow Flies
Pirate Latitiudes...Michael Crichton
The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet...Colleen McCullough
Drood...Dan Simmons
Minding Frankie...Maeve Binchy
Eat Pray Love...Elizabeth Gilbert
The Last Dickens...Matthew Pearl
The Gate House...Nelson DeMille
New York...Edward Rutherfurd

The list does go on. So, guess what? I'm going to break down and buy a Kindle when I'm in the States this summer.
I'm going to buy a Kindle for a few reasons.
one: I don't have room for all these books already
two: I am paying a fortune to buy them and get bubkehs (HMMM another B) when I take them to the Used Book Stores. (Now that's a store I'm sorry I didn't invent)
three: there is no three.
I am going to miss holding my nice books and feeling the pages and using the bookmarks I have saved over the years to mark my place. I am going to miss turning pages and marking them with felt markers when I feel the need to remember something special that is written.

Before Pessach, I brought in a girl to help me clean. Took her an hour in the kitchen to clean out all the cupboards and four hours to go through the books I had in my bedroom, the hall closet, the little porch off my room known in Hebrew as a mirpesset. Four hours!!! Why was I keeping all those old books???

Why? Because I couldn't bear to part with them. Well, guess what? There are only so many sardines that will fit into a can and my cup was running over, so to speak.
ps. if you like you can send me a list of your favourite books. I'd love to hear what you're reading.

Maybe they should have called it a Bindle so I could have at least kept my B.

Shabbat shalom...didn'tcha just love the wedding? I'm such a pushover for the Royals.

Have a great day...stay safe...and thanks for dropping in.