The Promise of A Bookshelf

          Aren't bookshelves lovely things? They hold so much promise, and a beauty of their own too. The colors, the variation in fonts, sizes and textures...

         Then, if it is my own bookshelf, there is also the way that I can see the books I have read maybe once, maybe over and over, and remember the most treasured lines from each. Or I think of the times I was reading it, or how I came to have that book at all, or the essays I had a love-hate relationship with in High School.

         I also have one whole shelf of my "To-Reads". That shelf taunts me constantly.

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book." - Henry David Thoreau

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

-- Dr. Seuss

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

-- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huck Finn

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

-- C.S. Lewis 

"A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting."

-- Henry David Thoreau

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children

is not a good children's story in the slightest.”

- C. S. Lewis

          Doesn't just looking at all these books make you want to run your hands over them, flip through the pages, and settle down with a stack of the most promising ones?

May it please the supreme and divine Goodness to give us all abundant grace

ever to know His most holy will and perfectly to fulfill it.

- St. Ignatius of Loyola