When we first moved (back) to Toronto, there was much hammering. At all hours of the night and day my father would hammer, and occasionally we, the oldest two, my brother and I, would be called in to hold planks in place and hammer in sundry nails.
The result was a floor to ceiling wooden bookshelf. It covers one entire wall of the living room and was made to be home to all our books.
Silly us.

When it comes to books in my house, the positions are clearly demarcated.
There are my father’s books. And there are my books.
My father has been a teacher or a tutor, in addition to an engineer, most of his life. This means we have an impressive collection of textbooks. They range from high school to university level textbooks, mostly on Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics, which are my father’s areas of expertise. Now that my siblings are somewhat older, I took the liberty of weeding out the many (so many) first grade books we had. And no, I felt no twinges of nostalgia as I tossed our first scrawls into the recycling. There are a number of my own books among that collection, primarily the textbooks of courses I completed, but, having completed the courses, I never open the textbooks again.
My jurisdiction encompasses all the fiction (all!), the poetry, and the prose. The grammar books are an area of contention between my father and me. We maintain a cease-fire there. Over the years, I have amassed quite a collection, and in these last few months, I have made regular trips downtown buying books like other people buy clothes.
I should note here that books are much the cheaper quickfix, especially given that I have no qualms buying books second hand. (And I don’t understand people who do.)
This semester, however, I have had precious little time to read anything not actually on my course reading lists. That didn’t stop me from buying books, of course. As with anything else, this is as much about ownership as it is about the using of.

Anyway, back to the bookshelf.
I’d thought it would be nicely split down the middle, with my father’s turf on the right and mine on the left.
As primary creator, however, my father took the liberty of taking just as much space as he liked. I made every effort to squeeze my own books into what space was left, but far too many of them are packed into the crevasses between the unopened cardboard boxes in the closest opposite my brothers’ room.

My brother is visiting and yesterday, we went book shopping.
We bought:

  • Selected Short Fiction by Charles Dickens
  • Heartbreaks Along the Road by Roch Carrier and translated by Sheila Fischman
  • Augustus Carp Esq. by Himself
  • Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood

We then proceeded to the grocery store, where we spent a dollar more than we had at the bookstore.

And recently I completed:

  • If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Thing by Jon McGregor
  • Everything is Illuminated by Jonathon Safron Froer