Books

Recently, my brother cleaned out some of his bookshelves and gave me two shopping bags full of books. When I first asked him if he had any books he could donate, he said "NO, I LIKE my books." Typical response from my brother. When I explained that it was for my librarian friend who worked in a juvenile detention center, where kids await trial as adults for very bad unspeakable crimes they committed, where they have no library and hardback books are forbidden in case they're used as weapons, where reading is sometimes the only thing that keeps them stimulated and encouraged, he reconsidered.

One afternoon, he disappeared for a couple of hours, and came back with all the books. He had been quietly sorting all the books that he could part with, and rereading some of his favorites. I looked through all of them too and had a flashback to when we were kids. I used to buy him books all the time, hoping that I could singlehandedly shape him to be a reader like me, to enjoy the same types of books I did. Every time I went to the mall with my friends, I always remembered to bring him back a book I thought he might enjoy. When my fourth grade teacher read James Howes' Bunnicula to the class, I started buying my five year old brother all the vampire bunny books the next couple of years. When I fell in love with Roald Dahl's The Twits in sixth grade, I started him on a collection of Roald Dahl books.

To this day, I still like buying him books, though he often favors books about business, finances, and self-improvement mumbo jumbo. Sometimes he'll surprise me by raving about popular novels like Da Vinci Code and convince me to read them, or he'll whimsically decide to jump on the trend of reading Harry Potter years after I blubbered on and on about the books to him.

When I looked in the bags at all those books I bought him, I got a little sad. (I also took back one of the books to keep, something I had read at least twenty times. One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith.) Then my brother confessed "that was hard. I had to reread a lot of them one last time. I'm also keeping all the Roald Dahl books." After that I felt better. And ready to pass the books onto a new generation of readers.