a case of the books, pt. 2

So, when I was younger, I used to watch Beauty and the Beast obsessively. I don't know why, I just loved the story and the music and just the general awesomeness of Disney. Even though my favorite Disney princess/protagonist (because apparently, some people don't consider her a princess) has been Pocahontas, Belle was also SO awesome because a) she wears yellow, b) she loves books, and c) she stands up against an egotistical jerkface who claims to love her when he's really more in love with himself!

I mean, come on. Yellow, books, AND knows how to decide things for herself and speak her mind? AWESOME! (Oh and don't forget that she's a pro at riding those ladders across bookshelves and jumping across rooftops.) My elementary school bookworm+tomboy self was ENTHRALLED.

But besides Belle, one other thing that was SUPER AWESOME was her LIBRARY that the Beast presents to her as a gift. I mean, seriously. I would pretty much die if a guy gifted me this:

I mean, of course, it would be weird to be gifted something that's a part of his house...so I guess the guy would have to be my husband. NEVERTHELESS. This is SUCH a ballin' library!! How did he even amass that many books in his lifetime? I mean, I guess he inherited it because he was a prince...so he didn't have to spend that much money himself...but still. It's so beautiful! It seriously blew my mind as a 4-year-old. And it still does!

Therefore, I was SUPER excited to find that when I returned home from this past semester, my parents had put in a brand new bookcase in my room. It's about like 1/100 (1/200? 1/500?) the size of Belle's library, but it made me really really happy because I could see how in potentially another 20 years, I'd be able to amass twice the number or even 3x or 4x the number of books on these shelves.

Sorry for the poor quality photo (Berryberry resolution)

Who cares about the Kindle or the iPad or whatever? Books are the bomb. And although my kids may be toting those kinds of electronic devices when they're attending school, I really really hope they'll be able to appreciate the print library we have in our house. It's really been my dream to have an impressive home library just because I didn't get to grow up with one (my parents' bookshelves are pretty bare, having left their books in Korea or something, and a lot of the ones we have are like old computer science/business books written in Korean...-_-). The only English novel my mom had was The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, which I read over and over again, just so I could feel like I was reading something my mom had read. (It helped that it's about mother-daughter relationships, so I really felt like the book was supposed to speak to me.)

Every time I jot down something in my books for school, I get super excited at the thought that maybe my kids will read these books and feel like they have a connection to my college self, that they'll read the notes I made in the margins and be like "wow, I never thought about that sentence that way before" or "hm, is that what she learned?" There's just something SO crazy about that - it's like letting someone else read a journal you wrote 10 years ago or something, only less personal, of course.

So yeah. Basically, my dream is to have a library like Belle's (or something akin to it, since I probably won't have the money/space for such a crazy library) and to share my books with my kids/grandkids/great-grandkids/etc so that we can all bask in the awesomeness of paper and words and ideas for years to come!