Behind the Scenes of My Nerdy Book Club Post

Yesterday my first ever guest post was published on the Nerdy Book Club (@nerdybookclub) website. It was about my experience as a parent with raising a reader, and it was written in celebration of my daughter's eleventh birthday. If you visit the blog and read the post, you'll see a picture of my daughter in front of a stack of books. That picture tells only a small part of the entire story.




It may look like the picture was staged -- as if we took the books off some shelves, piled them up and asked my daughter to pose. The truth is: those books are a permanent part of our living room. We really have no other place to store the books. As a matter of fact, it's not unusual to see piles of books in our house.

There are books stacked in the dining room and the living room. There are books on shelves and piled up in our den. There are books on the kitchen table. Not even the closets are safe. There are books in all three bedroom closets. A few years ago, I packed up all the history books from my undergraduate thesis and stored them in the garage. We also have a couple of e-readers with books on them.

How do people at work know which car is mine? It's the one with the books in it.

I guess when you have a family of four, and all of them are readers, this is bound to happen. There just isn't enough space to accommodate all of our books.

We've tried to cut down on the amount of books in the house. I've gone at least twice to Half Price Books since the kids were born and sold some books. We've borrowed books from the public library, and I've checked out books to myself from my school library. My daughter has given away books when her teachers have had book exchanges for the holidays, usually providing more than one book for each exchange she's participated in.

And yet, we still don't have enough space. Because it's just too hard to separate oneself from something that bring so much joy.

By the way, those are only about half of my daughter's books. The rest of her books are piled in her bedroom, the den, the living room, possibly the kitchen, definitely my bedroom, and one or both of the cars.

When my son or daughter needs a particular book, it's a chaotic mess looking through stacks and stacks of books. But until my husband and I are self-made millionaires and can afford a proper library in our home, this is how it's going to be.

To be honest, I wouldn't want it any other way.