book shelf

I take great pride in my books. They are my babies. Even if by some chance I own a book that I don't like I still have a hard time letting it go.
Some days books are my saving grace. I can escape to them whenever i feel depressed or sad or the world is upside down my books are there. I can run to a familiar place and hide in their pages. This is not a solution to my problems mind you, just an escape for a few minutes or hours. However long it takes for me to become me again.
I always love spreading my love for books, but I hate giving my own books out...I missing a lot of them and I do not know who I gave them out to.
I use to hate reading. I had a hard time with it. If there is anything I know about myself it is that if I think something is difficult I don't want to do it. It wasn't until I was in Junior High that I started reading the books I had to for school.
Slowly I started branching out and finding books I liked. Now I have a whole floor to ceiling bookshelf full...and it doesn't even hold all of my books. People who see it always ask if I have read them all. I always have to sadly say no and point to the top shelf...the books I am working on finishing. That is where they should be anyways. Also my all time can't live without books are usually on the second or third shelf. But the books I am working on finishing along with my favorites usually end up in a pile by my bed...(Not a stack...truly a pile...they fall there when I fall asleep and they usually don't get put back on the shelf until I get the rare urge to clean everything).
Some people my be upset to hear this but I do dog ear corners. Not in library books, never in library books that always drives me up a wall. Not because it is simply a dog eared corner. It bothers me because I want to know why someone did it. Chances are they did it to mark where they stopped reading. But it could also be because they liked a certain phrase or passage, or because they book fell and they straightened every page but that one, or because they didn't understand one part of it, or because some one held them at gun point and made them do it. All of these are possible.

But I do dog ear the corners of my own books, to mark my favorite parts. This is so that I can easily find them if I want a quick pick me up. After a while though the book gets so beat up that it simply falls open to most of my favorite parts so they don't need to be dog eared any more. But I leave the page turned over, out of habit.