The Book Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

150,000. But Tess had decided her aunt was right about people according more value to things they could not have so readily. If William thought he could have only ten, every week, it would be more meaningful to him.
    He walked through the aisles, his eyes strafing the spines. “How will I save them all?” William said.
    “One week at a time,” Tess said. “But you have to promise that this will be your only, um, supplier from now on. If you get books from anywhere else, you won’t be allowed to come here anymore. Do you understand, William? Can you agree to that?”
    “I’ll manage,” William said. “These books really need me.”
    It took him forty-five minutes to pick his first book, Manifold Destiny, a guide to cooking on one’s car engine.
    “Really?” Tess said. “That’s a book that needs to be liberated?”
    William looked at her with pity, as if she were a hopeless philistine.
    “He spent five hours there, selecting his books,” Tess told Crow that evening, over an early supper. Crow worked Saturday evenings, so they ate early in order to spend more time together.
    “Did you feel guilty at all? He’s just going to tear them apart and destroy them.”
    “Is he? Destroying them, I mean. Or is he making something beautiful, as his brother would have it? I go back and forth.”
    Crow shook his head. “An emotionally disturbed man with scissors, cutting up books inside his home, taking a walk with you and our daughter, whose middle name is Scout. And you didn’t make one Boo Radley joke the entire time?”
    “Not a one,” Tess said. “You do the bath. I’ll clean up.”
    But she didn’t clean up, not right away. She went into her own library, a cozy sun-room lined with bookshelves. She had spent much of her pregnancy here, reading away, but even in three months of confinement she barely made a dent in the unread books. She had always thought of it as being rich, having so many books she had yet to read. But in William’s view, she was keeping them confined. And no one else, other than Crow, had access to them. Was her library that different from William’s?
    Of course, she had paid for her books—most of them. Like almost every other bibliophile on the planet, Tess had books, borrowed from friends, that she had never returned, even as some of her favorite titles lingered in friends’ homes, never to be seen again.
    She picked up her iPad. Only seventy books loaded onto it. Only. Mainly things for work, but also the occasional self-help guide that promised to unlock the mysteries of toddlers. Forty of the seventy titles were virtually untouched. She wandered into Carla Scout’s room, where there was now a poster of a bearded man living in a pile of books, the Arnold Lobel print from The Children’s Bookstore. A payment/gift from a giddy Octavia, who didn’t know how Tess had stopped her books from disappearing, and certainly didn’t know that her crush had anything to do with it. During Carla Scout’s bedtime routine, Tess now stopped in front of the poster, read the verse printed there, then added her own couplet. “It’s just as much fun as it looks/To live in a house made of books.”
    It’s what’s in the book that matters. Standing in her daughter’s room, which also had shelves and shelves filled with books, Tess remembered a character in a favorite story saying that to someone who objected to using the Bible as a fan on a hot summer day. But she could no longer remember which story it was.
    Did that mean the book had ceased to live for her? The title she was trying to recall could be in this very room, along with all of Tess’s childhood favorites, waiting for Carla Scout to discover them one day. But what if she rejected them all, insisting on her own myths and legends, as Octavia had prophesied? How many of these books would be out of print in five, ten years? What did it mean to be out of print in a world where books could live inside devices, glowing like captured genies,