What the Bookcase Says
Please not another one
The Cull
In these many on-again-off-again months of pandemic isolation, before embarking on comics-making lessons and sometime between a brief stint with jigsaw puzzles and cooking intensively from a Madhur Jaffrey vegetarian Indian cookbook, I went through a decluttering stage. Books were the most challenging part, but I do think it’s good to curb hoarding tendencies and ask yourself why you keep a particular set of books around.
Some people keep every book they finish, which I did unthinkingly until I lived in New York, where the apartments are small, and moving is horrible and inevitable when you’re young. I had to change my philosophy and only keep books that I had some certainty about rereading.
Over the years, the ratio of unread-to-read books has shifted, with the unread pile growing ever larger, as I often buy books for a mood lift/writing inspiration (I’ve managed to stop feeling guilty about this habit, there are certainly more expensive vices), and have grown compulsive about getting rid of books as soon as I finish them. The unread books have also multiplied because, for the past few years, I’ve lived a 15-minute bike ride from a FREE book warehouse. (It’s called the Boekenzolder (“Book Attic”) and run by an army of zealously organized elderly Dutch volunteers. They have books in a dozen languages, including a big section in English that often turns up interesting contemporary fiction, not just the usual thrillers and romance paperbacks. The limit is ten books per person per visit. Ten!)
During the pandemic decluttering, I ended up distributing a lot of my unread Boekenzolder haul to the free little libraries around town, admitting my avarice and facing down the reality that I was not going to read most of those books any time soon.
It’s always illuminating to scan someone’s bookshelves, even your own. The culling made me realize some things about myself, not just the books I got rid of, but also the ones that insisted on staying. I don’t mean the obvious, important books, the ones I mention when people ask what my favorites are. I was more interested in the other ones that stuck around, even though I couldn’t provide certainty about their life-changing qualities or probability of being read.
What remained, and what they told me:
Dictionaries. They’re heavy, they’re essentially obsolete given all the free, lightning-fast online dictionaries and tools. But I can’t let go of my two-volume unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, which requires a magnifying glass to read; the Real Academia Espanola Spanish dictionary; the Dictionary of American Slang; Le Petit Robert, etc. They owe their place on the shelf to my translator’s pride, some need of tangible evidence of this part of my life, but also to this feeling I’ve had for I-don’t-know-how-long but which became more visible during the pandemic: that in case the Internet collapses or we permanently lose electricity or some other such calamity, we will need dictionaries. A (yes, not entirely rational) feeling that I might need to reconstruct the language, or languages at some point, or that the dictionaries are as essential as matches or clean water.
Poetry. Maybe this category is unsurprising if you know me, but while I do read more poetry than the average person, I definitely read less than the average poet (or at least poets I know). If I’m honest, the amount of poetry on my shelves misrepresents how often I read it (I don’t like to admit this). The poetry books all stick around, even though they might not have changed my life, because they still might. You never know with poetry, sometimes you flip through a book and the line you need that moment appears. On a more practical level, poetry books tend to be less replaceable, as they’re generally from small presses with limited print runs. So if you have a sudden need of a book you regret giving away, you might be out of luck. I just learned, for example, that Ahsahta Press shuttered in 2020, which means that Anne Boyer’s excellent, timely, incisive, playful Garments Against Women is out of print! Just like that! WTF. The woman won the Pulitzer Prize for her cancer memoir last year, but of course no one cares about her poetry. I’m glad I bought a copy in 2019.
Aspirational pseudo-college student books: When I was 20, I spent some difficult months in a slow-motion panic, partly because that’s when it began to dawn on me that I would have to make some binding decisions about the course of my life - I wouldn’t be able to deeply study every language I wanted, for example, or explore every profession that interested me. I would have to choose and by default reject other paths, and how would I know whether I had taken the right one? My current bookshelves reflect some of the paths I didn’t take: books on the history of Latin America, gender studies, psychology, mythology, archeology, the history of Ancient Rome… none of which I’ve read. They’re books the person I want to be would have read. But I haven’t given up on them yet. (They also represent in part still formless writing projects I’ve been kicking around for ages that require some research.)
Other 2021 Business
Reading
Speaking of books and reading confessions, I will be sending out my annual reading round-up beginning in January 2022, my completist account of books I read in 2021, for anyone who enjoys a book list. (This will be the only time I send this newsletter weekly, otherwise I will continue sporadically.) You can read my 2020 round-up, including everyone’s comments, too, in the archive here.
Writing
In terms of a writing round-up, my 2021 is rather meager, but I was happy to have an essay in Gulf Coast this year - on contending with femininity, stereotypes about Latin American women, red lipstick, #metoo…
I published a few book reviews at the Chicago Review of Books and The Literary Review. My personal favorite of the bunch is one I wrote on Real Estate, the third installment of Deborah Levy’s wonderful “working autobiography.”
Editing
In 2021, I gladly became the assistant flash fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine, a mostly online literary journal, which I had preciously admired for its playful sensibility and the good feeling it gave me about contemporary writing. (So many lit journals give me a sense of stultifying obligation, like I should be reading this stuff, but it’s no fun.) I experienced one of those rare and delicious moments editors live for and that keeps me sorting through the big stack of submissions: reading a piece that leapt out in its originality and voice and realizing we would get to publish it. This was Ariele Le Grand’s flash story, The Lines You Cross, which appeared in the August issues. The story makes such great use of the flash form, telescoping a relationship across time in less than 1,000 words.
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I am so curious about others’ book-keeping/collecting/culling philosophies, please share your thoughts in a comment or drop a line if you want to share your own.
My whole bookcase is a largely unread, but steadily expanding, monument to roads not taken; but I've gradually decided I'm OK with that.
I generally keep every book I read. I am pretty spartan in possessions otherwise, but it’s the one collection I still allow myself through multiple moves. I track it back to me being a slow reader, easily distracted, so finishing a book is still feels like an accomplishment, something I am proud to do every time. My bookshelf is like a trophy case in that way, so I can say to myself “look what I accomplished.” I love to look at it. From high school until the late ‘00s, I actually kept the shelves in chronological order of when I read them as a sort of record of reading. At some point it got ungainly in moving apartments and I lost track of the order (it’s something I’ve tried to recreate on Goodreads). Spurred by limited shelf space and the fact that there are so many books I read & loved that are not on the shelf (borrowed, library, audiobooks), I just recently allowed myself to take books off I hated. As for the unread stack, like many readers and lovers of bookstores, that I will always struggle with. The temptation to pick up more books even though I know how many already sit there untouched. And I will trim that if I can accept I’m not going to muster the enthusiasm to read a book, though some can sit in that stack for years and actually get read (Rum Punch sat there for like 7 years and I read this year - and loved it).