The Purge/Laura Lippman
My 6-year-old daughter owns, conservatively, 78,230 objects, most of them small enough to be invisible to the (older) human eye, but large enough to be lethal to the (bare) human foot. She has so much stuff that she does not notice when I slip into her room and fill entire trash bags of stuff, then hide them in the basement to see if she even misses what has disappeared.
(Spoiler alert: So far, so good.)
But my daughter is also an artist, as she would be the first to tell you. ("I have so many talents," she says, and sighs with bliss at her unique burden.) She has a keen eye and appreciates beauty. So imagine my delight when she took in my (small rowhouse) bedroom and said: "You don't have a lot of stuff. I would like my room to look more like this."
It's true, my bedroom is very simple. A bed that backs up to a console filled with books, an armoire, a bookshelf, four etchings by my husband's late sister -- and that's it. No television. (We love television in our house, but we keep the sets out of bedrooms.) No surfaces on which stuff can accumulate. I like it, but it never occurred to me that my kid would, too. Kids live for stuff.
In stuff begins responsibility -- isn't that how the old poem goes? My bedroom might be spare, but, overall, I have too much stuff. And when I say "stuff," I mean -- gasp -- books. I own too many books. They keep coming, like the chocolates on the conveyor belt on the old I Love Lucy episode. My books, books by others. Books I love but will never re-read. Books whose spines I might never crack, for one reason or another.
So, starting this month, I'm going to begin my own version of the Purge. I am going to give away a dozen books, every month, to a lucky (?) person who follows/shares a photo of my mystery package on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That's it: When you see the photo, share. If you don't already follow me, please do. Once a month, someone will receive a dozen books, with a personal note from me.
I will make one request: Please keep the contents of the mystery boxes a mystery. I don't want other writers to feel unloved because I've decided I can give up their books. (Hey, I'm including my own books in some of these packages.) So to repeat the rules: When you see a photo of the mystery package in my social media stream -- https://www.facebook.com/lauralippman/, https://www.facebook.com/laura.lippman.7, https://twitter.com/LauraMLippman or https://www.instagram.com/lauramlippman/ -- share, follow if you don't already, and you're entered to win.
Meanwhile, I'd love to share my latest read with you, but I hate it so much that it must not be named. Sigh. However, I have boundless optimism for the novel I just started yesterday, Justine Larbalestier's My Sister Rosa, a wonderful variation on The Bad Seed, one of my beloved reads.
Laura Lippman
April 2017