Book Cycle

27th April 2012 Friday

Our house is full of books. Books in nearly every room. As we are taking three boxes of my father’s books to Book-Cycle in Exeter I suggest that we take some of ours   - well my husband’s anyway, as he won’t be reading them again.  I pick out one book at a time, read out the title, the author. He shakes his head and puts it on the pile on the floor. He doesn’t recognise any of them.

‘Did I really read this?’ he says, flicking through a fat volume of  Robertson Davis’s Cornish Trilogy. 

‘Yes. But not every book on this shelf,’ I say.

But most of them. All that history and politics and psychology and  fiction fantasy and thrillers.

‘Oh, this was your acting Bible,’ I say. A book called ‘Impro’ by Keith Johnson about Improvisation and Method Acting.

‘The name is familiar,’ he says. ‘What do you mean, my Bible?’

So now I know more about my husband’s past than he does. Even the bits when I wasn’t there.

Book-Cycle does a wonderful job - it’s a charity that sends thousands of books to children around the world and plants trees and promotes seed banks and provides performance and art exhibition space.

I’m glad my father’s Bibles - and my husband’s - are going to new homes.

You can find them at www.book-cycle.org