I get to go shopping for books today. It doesn’t matter that they’re not books for me. Books! New ones! All full of potential! Glossy dust jackets or uncreased paperback spines!

Syd’s birthday and Christmas are coming. He wants books. I am a happy mom. (But too lazy to look up links for all the stuff that follows.)

I know I want to get him the Greens cookbook. I know I want to get him some Dickens, but I’m not sure which one. I haven’t read them all, by any stretch. I disliked A Tale of Two Cities when last I read it, but it took three trips through Great Expectations, two compulsory and one voluntary, for me to grow up enough to like it. Maybe David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby. I loved Bleak House, and I found it an interesting thing to reread Jane Eyre soon after. Opinions welcome on the subject.

I’m sure there will be books that jump out at me and say: This one! Syd will love me! This frees me from too much advance planning.

I also know I need to get the next book after The Lightning Thief for T. and me to read out loud. (He plans to give me further book in the series for Christmas. I am lucky!)

The trick is to get out of the bookstore without buying anything just for myself. And then finding some more time to read.