FOR THE BOOKS

We're both book lovers. My titles: fashion, chic lit, Oprah's Book Club selections, best sellers, Anthony Bourdain. His titles: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ayn Rand, Sun Tzu, history, magic realism, leadership, art, architecture, interiors, the classics, biographies, mountaineering, health, psychology, even reference books. Our common titles: travel, advertising, poetry.

This common passion results in book dates -- sometimes in coffee shops (over cake and tea – we're not coffee drinkers), sometimes in book stores, often in bed. We'd both be silent, engrossed in our current read. But whenever we come across an extremely interesting quip, story, information, we'd excitedly read the line or paragraph to the other. An example of simultaneous Me Time and Couple Time.

Currently, I'm into Elizabeth Gilbert's “Eat, Pray, Love” while he's into Wilfred Funk's “Word Origins.”

Gilbert is readable and funny. Her sharing is so honest, so raw, so real I sometimes find myself thinking “I understand. I have been there. I am there.”

I think people have children for all manner of reasons – sometimes out of a pure desire to nurture and witness life, sometimes out of an absence of choice, sometimes in order to hold on to a partner or create an heir, sometimes without thinking about it in any particular way. Not all the reasons to have children are the same, and not all of them are necessarily unselfish. Not all the reasons not to have children are the same, either, though. Nor are all those reasons necessarily selfish. (From “Eat, Pray Love,” 2006.)

The excerpt is a prelude to my very personal next blog entry.