Odd Book Assortment

There are a lot of books in my house that hail from the era when I worked at Barnes and Noble. The one that prompted me yesterday to start blogging is called Crimes for Christmas, edited by Richard Dalby.

I have a set of several of these Christmas-themed mystery anthologies on my mystery shelf, and I really don't care much about them. Still, I can't let a book go without reading through it, so that is why I plucked it off the shelf a few weeks before Christmas. I thought at the time that it could be a fun seasonal read, but of course the actual holidays got in the way of my finding much reading time, so I only managed to start it a few days ago.

I like mysteries but I don't read them very often, which is a bit odd. Mystery books were what hooked me on reading; my Mom had a box of old-school Nancy Drew books in our attic (the kind where cars are called "roadsters"), and I read through them like a demon when I was in third and fourth grade. I also spend a lot of time pretending I was Nancy Drew, but that is neither here nor there.

Agatha Christie's work got a lot of my attention in fifth and sixth grade, although I vastly preferred Miss Marple to Hercules Poirot (probably because I couldn't adequately pronounce Poirot's name at the time and I was flummoxed by the title "M." I was desperately in need of French lessons).

Crimes for Christmas includes sixteen short crime stories, all with a Christmas link in them. It includes stories by familiar names like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters, and (of course) Agatha Christie. There are also authors I've never heard of in my life; Fergus Hume, Pamela Sewell, and Lennox Robinson.

Overall it is mildly entertaining, but not something I will need on my shelf forever. The most interesting thing about it may have been the ancient insurance card in it, complete with my Social Security number and my original (before I married and hyphenated) name. But we'll see.

The scary thing is that I have at least six more of these Christmas mystery anthologies on that shelf. I need to get to work on them.

Spur of the Moment Decisions

I've been on a quest to read some of the books that are in my house. That sounds like an obvious thing to do, but somehow I've been accumulating them for years while not reading many of them; instead I've been reading books people lend me, books from the library, books for school (I graduated from nursing school in December of 2009 at the age of 37). The result is that - with my kids now also accumulating books at a rapid pace - I have no place to go with the excess. Bookshelves are overflowing and, although my house is not small, I don't have room for much more in the way of bookshelves. Thus, the project: read some of these books and clear them out somehow.

I have multiple other projects, of course, which is making the project move along slowly. But today I was reading an old mystery anthology on my shelf and I found tucked within it a health care insurance card from the days when I worked at Barnes and Noble. That was between the years of 1995 and 1997. It is now 2011; I honestly didn't even remember that I had health insurance when I had that job.

So my plan for this blog? Prod me on my way to moving these books out the door, but also keep me motivated to do it by cataloging what the books are, where they came from, and what weird items I find in them along the way. And yes, I did just decide to do this on the spur of the moment, perhaps fifteen minutes ago.