THE MOST IMPORTANT FURNITURE IN YOUR HOUSE

I loved them all.

It’s the bookcase, of course. The most important furniture in a house is the bookcase. Some people don’t trust folks who don’t have a dog. I don’t trust people who don’t have a place for their books. 

People without shelves stuffed to the brim with actual, physical books are quite possibly soulless droids. Oh, they'll comment on the dust that books gather or the space they take up, but in the end, the clicking of their circuitry gives them away. 

I grew up in a house with bookcases crammed with actual, physical books. It was the age of book of the month clubs, Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and the golden age of the public libraries. There were three television channels . . . And books. I loved those books.

My youngest son wants to read a thousand books in his lifetime. I already have. He doesn’t believe me, but then he didn’t grow up when I did, or how I did.

At Oviedo High School, I wandered into the library and didn't leave. I discovered the Salem Witchcraft trials through Miller's The Crucible and then read all the non-fiction versions of the same event. I disappeared into the inspiring, horrific accounts of war written by Leon Uris, the mysteries and histories, and romances of Victoria Holt, the horrors of Edger Allen Poe, the absolute mastery of Shirley Jackson’s writing. And I devoured all the science fiction I could put my hands on. Ray Bradbury made me believe in Martians and rockets and dandelion wine. Pearl S. Buck made me believe in faraway places on the library globe.

I read and read and read. I read books I can't remember the titles of, but their characters still live in my head. There was a funny book about a girl who worked in a bridal shop, a sad book about a girl who worked at the carnival as the snake woman, the story of a housewife who claimed to remember her past life as an Irish woman named Bridey Murphy, and so many more. 

In college, I knew things the other students did not because I had read hundreds of books. 

For a lonely girl born in the fifties to a family with its overly fair share of dysfunction and growing up in the tumultuous sixties, books in bookcases were better than friends. They were lifesavers. 

Today, I’m boxing up hundreds of books to make room for more books—some of which I wrote myself.

Linda (Dust Jacket) Zern