Guest Post with Stephanie Cowell, Author of Claude and Camille

Today I have the wonderful opportunity to present my readers with a guest post by Stephanie Cowell. This fits into this time of year - spring - when we all do a little weeding out of what we have and prepping for the additional wonderful books we can get. Take it away Stephanie...

"How many books are on your night table?"

I must confess that my house is joyfully cluttered with books, and, if you are reading this guest blog, I suppose your house is likewise cluttered. I never can understand how I got so many! I buy them online and in large and small bookstores. I linger at street vendors who display them on rickety tables in my New York City neighborhood. My publishers send them to me. My friends bring them to me. Some of them follow me home, hiding in my laundry bag.

The other day I tried to count the ones on my night table and my shelf still to be read and gave up at about twenty-five. I know there are more. Plus I am a great re-reader. I re-read books often, still with a slight sense of anxiety, because you never know for sure if Elizabeth will marry Mr. Darcy this time or if she has run off to some other book and found another hero.

Something else: no novel I love is replaceable by any other novel. And sometimes when I can’t sleep I suddenly get a desire to read a particular novel and get up to look for it. “What are you looking for?” my husband asks me from his pillow and his own reading. “A book,” I mutter. He looks at the great pile on my night table and leaning up against the side of my bed. “You have a book,” he says. “I want one particular book,” I reply. Sometimes twenty minutes later at two in the morning I am standing on a chair by the living room shelves, balancing precariously and trying to find it. Being a book lover can be dangerous.
Every year I sit down to figure out which books I can bring to the library to donate. This takes a long time, because I get lost in reading every fifth one I put my hands on. I have been known to drag them in a shopping cart and just when the librarian is about to sweep them gratefully away, I plunge my hand in and retrieve two or three to take back again. “You know you couldn’t have a full life without us!” the books murmur. “What could you have been thinking?” And, safe in the cart and content as cats, they go home with me again.

Thanks Stephanie for this wonderful post - this is an experience that I think all of us readers can relate to!

Other events for the HFBRT today:

~ Lizzy's Book Review at Historically Obsessed

~Author Interview with Stephanie at Passages to the Past

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