It has probably become evident by now that I have a small “problem” with books.  I love books.  I love reading for pleasure, I love reading to my children, I love seeing them read, I love discussing books I’ve read with other people…you get the idea.

I really prefer buying books.  I love having a nice, organized bookshelf full of my favorites, books I want to come back to again and again, books that make excellent reference material, that sort of thing.  Actually, our bookshelves are quite overflowing (Ryan likes books as much as I do, which is kind of disastrous!) and we have boxes of books in the basement.

My view towards books for school is no different.  I really would rather buy the stuff we’ll be reading.  That’s not really totally feasible, however, especially if we want to, I don’t know, continue buying groceries and paying the mortgage.  So, apart from our curriculum books, which I of course buy, I try to limit my purchases to certain types of books.  Books I know we’ll read over and over (the Ramona series, for example), books we’ll need over an extended period of time, special holiday books that may be hard to find at the library around said holiday.

Of course, even with those limitations, we own a lot of school books.  But, frequent trips to the library are also part of school.  Today, I needed to get the next Henry Huggins book, as we’ve finished the first three in the series.  This particular series will eventually be part of our permanent collection because it’s so fantastic, but as two of the books are part of future Sonlight cores, I’ll wait to buy the remaining books until we reach those grade levels.

So, in I went to get Henry and the Paper Route.  I found it right away, as I’ve become quite familiar with where the Henry books reside in the library.  After I found it, I looked around for a bit.  I left the library about 10 minutes later, not with the one book I had gone in for, but with eight!

I hate to think what my receipt would have looked like had I gone into Borders or Barnes and Noble, or even ordered from Amazon, and purchased eight books instead of one.  I’m sure I would fall prey to the impulse buy just as much as the impulse borrow, although I try to be more restrained with the credit card than I am with the library card.  I’m very thankful our area has a good library system to spare me some of the cost of my book habit!