Well, here we are at Day 295. My littlest sister told me last weekend that I had messed this up and that I should actually be calling this “366Books” since it’s a leap year but it’s too late now. I guess I could skip a day and then it would be back to 365 but that would feel like cheating, somehow.

At this point, I’m finding it harder to choose books to write about. I have an entire shelf of Doonesbury Collections and another of Calvin & Hobbes. A shelf of travel guides. Two shelves of “how to figure out what you want to be when you grow up” books – and a lot of mysteries and science fiction by authors I’ve already written about.

My husband tells me that I should write about our Peanuts books. But those are his Peanuts books. He has been collecting Peanuts – and particularly, Snoopy – things since he was a child. We have the Hallmark ornaments and snow globes; just about every Whitman rubber figurine, as well as their stuffed animals holding chocolate boxes; two cookie jars; the entire collections of Welsh’s jams and McDonalds glasses; art; 3 nativity sets (one porcelain); blankets; and over 200 t-shirts & sweatshirts; three – no wait, 4 – no 5 cd’s with different versions of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

It got so bad that I had to tell the families, “NO MORE.” Only they get stymied buying Christmas presents and just go back to it.

When we moved in together many years ago, my husband was excited to decorate, “We’ll put some in the living room, and some in the bedroom, and some in the kitchen…” but I persuaded him that they would make a much stronger statement if they were curated into the shelves in the walled off dining alcove that is our tiny guest room. So we filled 25 linear feet with his collectibles, hung the art on the wall, and piled the throws high on the pull-out loveseat. Only the books and the two sets of bookends ended up in the living room. Oh, and holiday plates and sake glasses in the kitchen. But I could close the door to the guest room and live blissfully free of tiny black eyes staring at me.

And then I changed jobs and the guest room became my WFH office.

Now, I like Snoopy, too – not as much as my husband does, but I do like Snoopy. We have pictures of me, aged 4, wearing a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, bearing the drawing of Snoopy dragging Linus (airborne) by Linus’s security blanket, with the caption, “Let go of my blanket you darned dog!” I think that’s my favorite series, although I also like the early Peanuts where Snoopy was much doggier than he was towards the end. I got a little bored with him in the 80s and 90s, when he was just a human that looked like a dog; it just got old. But then something shifted, Schulz freed up his style again, and things improved.

In addition to the books pictured above, we have books of photos of Snoopy wearing clothing from international designers. We have books about the theology and the philosophy of Charles M. Schulz. We have other, earlier collections, as well as Scholastic pocket books with collections (one or two of those were mine but don’t ask me which). We have biographies of Schulz; we have books about the art of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

On our honeymoon, we made a pilgrimage to Santa Rosa, to visit the Schulz museum. It’s worth a trip if you’re ever in the neighborhood or passing by. I really enjoyed it. I think my favorite part was the tile. They printed the black and white daily strips onto subway tiles and created a giant mosaic of Lucy pulling the football away that takes up one whole wall of the museum. They also used the tiles in their bathroom. We were remodeling our bathroom at the time and, while I liked the tiles, I had to think long and hard about whether I really wanted a black and white bathroom. (We chose otherwise and then the accent tile I had chosen wasn’t available. And neither was the back-up choice. The contractor messed up my third choice. And the fourth choice wasn’t available either. And then I came home one day and discovered that the contractor had made up his mind and just installed something that I didn’t really like because he was over our job and ready to start a new one.)

Oh, all those diving books in the photo above are also my husband’s (diving equipment is hogging space in a closet). I tried to read The Devil’s Teeth but had to give up after a bunch of do-gooders rescued a baby seal and then unintentionally released him into shark-infested waters and watched in horror as he got eaten. That was enough for me. I can read about serial killers and the plague all day but people accidentally feeding a baby seal to great whites is too much for me.

Sorry if that’s a little morose. I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon and simultaneously watching the Giants get clobbered by the Eagles.