It's the Simple Pleasures... Like Hardcover Novels

I'm a hardcover person. They just look so beautiful on the shelf and I love the weight of them and how they are big enough to just lie open in your lap. I even love the papery smell when I buy a new hardcover... and I love the ones with the perforated edges and when you flip through a tiny poof of dust comes up from the freshly printed pages... I hear the creaking sound of the binding being opened and bent for the first time ... and I know a new adventure is about to start. It's true that they aren't as convenient for airplane rides because they are so bulky, but that, my friends, is what trendy softcover novels you don't mind throwing away are for, and also what Audiobooks that you can put on your iPod are for. If it is an author or a series that I really like or any book that I plan on keeping my own copy of, it has got to be hardcover.

The last couple of years I have gone through the Used books on Amazon.com like crazy to find hardcover copies of all my favorite series because I HATED having half in soft and half in hard- I'm a little OCD I think, but oh well, because now my bookshelves look lovely ;) I had never really given much thought to Deseret Industries except for going there to get Halloween costumes, which is what I was doing the week before Halloween his year when I discovered they have a pretty great little book section, with quite a few hardcovers, and they are all just two dollars each! So, now I have a new hobby. Some of the great hardcover finds I have purchased in the last few weeks are:


* A compilation book of three E.M. Forster novels- A Room With a View, Howard's End & Where Angels Fear to Tread
* Some John Grisham favorites-
-The Pelican Brief
-The Client
-Runaway Jury
- (Keeping my eyes out for A Time to Kill)
* Sense & Sensibility (to go with my hardcovers of Emma and Pride & Prejudice)
* Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
* Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
* The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
* The Complete Works of Shakespeare (k, so I already own a copy, but for the price, what could I do! So I got it for my friend Kirsten who I knew didn't have it already because she borrowed mine once and teased me for my notes that were still stuck in certain pages from when I took a Shakespeare course at BYU- you really wanted to know all that, right?)

My fantasy is to one day have a library like in Beauty & The Beast-

Okay, so maybe I would want something a tad bit cozier in scale, with fire places and rugs and pillows everywhere to just plop down and read, but you get the idea. Oh, I could just live in there. Speaking of which, my Mom could as well and I always tell her that when they are super old I will build a little guest room right off of my giant library for her to live in so she can just open her door right into the library in the morning and get to reading. Also, I will need to live by water, at least a little pond or something so Dad can have a place to putter around in a little sailboat. I have this wonderful vision of him as a senile old sailor- with scruff on his face and we'll have to ring the bell for him to come to dinner and he'll never take off his Captains hat. Dad may not be a huge fan of this potential scenario, but I think of it fondly ;)