It goes on for generations

"You have that book?" I asked my dad, with maybe a tad too much surprise.

"Yep," he said, getting up out of his creaky office chair and peering up at the bookshelves that surround his walls. "It's a Pulitzer Prize winning memoir. I haven't read it in eight years, since it came out, but I remember enjoying it, a lot." He handed me a copy of Angela's Ashes, fringed a bit at the jacket.

"Thanks," I took a short glance at the shelves on his wall that seemed to go on for miles, then veered back into my room.

I think that may have been the first time my dad and I had ever shared a book-ever. Up until that point, James (my six year old brother), my Dad, and I each had our own collection of books, usually stashed in our rooms. (With the exception of some of the Calvin and Hobbes books in the living room.)

So you could imagine my surprise when I asked my dad about Angela's Ashes and he said he had it. My dad and I had the same taste in movies, but all the books he owned intimidated me. "Grown-Up books," I used to call them. It's funny I was thinking this way even though I was watching complex R-rated movies with my dad by the time I was ten. But with books-it was like entering a new planet.

That was last May. I went into his shelves a couple of times that summer to find a thesaurus, a book of quotes, or to longingly glance at one of his bookshelves that held piles of classic novels. (Steinbeck, Salinger, etc).

Tonight, I truly broke the barrier.

I pulled a step stool up to the shelves covering the wall above his dresser. I was so bored of the tedious teen and young adult novels that I had always read. I wanted to read something emotional, informative, classic. I first looked at the top shelf, the dustiest of them all, finding a bounty of old fringed poetry collections. I took a handful off the shelf, leafing through the orangish-brownish color that old books tend to have. The musky smell of old pages and dust filled my nose. I finally settled on one poetry collection by T.S. Elliot.

Farther to the right of that top shelf were some smaller, thinner books. Unsure, I pulled them out, only to find that those small white books jammed together in the corner were plays, classic plays to be exact, plays I'd heard of. Plays I needed to read because I felt ignorant that I was aspiring to write a three act play and had only read or watched a handful of plays in my life. I decided to take Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman first.

I glanced at the other shelves, the ones that seemed slightly more touched from the others. Some of the books were alphbatized, and I scanned down to the D section only to find a section of books that were lined up, that were all about one thing- death. I wasn't surprised. My dad had experienced a lot of death in his life. I found quite a few of big, fat psychological study books. Then I saw a few about culture and dying, and pulled out of the shelf "The Sacred Art of Dying."

You get the point. Thanks to poking through my dad's bookshelves, I have three new books to read. But as usual, I'm over thinking it. Soon- sooner than I or he thinks- I may read all the books that scatter his shelves. Soon James may be reading the (decent) teen novels on my shelves, before moving on to my dad's books, as I did. As we grow older, all three of us will be able to talk about the same classic stories or ideas that generations before us knew of, the words so perfect and infinite.