Last night as I was cleaning out my closet, my book tower fell over.
I love books. I always have. I'm the kind of person who has a hard time going into a bookstore and walking out empty-handed. As I've begun to publish, I have more friends who write books and publish as well, and so I feel it's important to support their work by buying their books. I also believe strongly that independent bookstores are a great resource on the endangered species list, so every time I go into one of those, I almost always buy something as well.
The result of all this is that almost every square inch of surface area in my apartment is packed with books. My bookshelves, of course, but also my desk, my nightstand, the floor beside my desk, are all taken up by books. For some years, I used to save every book I've ever acquired, even ones I didn't like. After moving several times, I began to wonder whether it was such a good idea to continue carting around that thousand-page copy of Iain Pairs's An Instance at the Fingerpost, a book that sat on my shelves for four years unread. Did I really need to save Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, despite its rave review in the New York Times and beautiful gold spine? (Owned for six years, never opened once.) Or how about Jim McGreevey's Confession, or The Nanny Diaries, books I acquired for cheap, out of curiosity? My curiosity has now been satisfied. I'm ready to move on.
So every once in a while, I add a book to a tower of Babel that grows and grows in my closet until it reaches an absurd height, and then I remove the books from the apartment, sell them or donate them or give them away. The trouble is, the tower seems to grow ever more rapidly, and it's all I can do to keep up.
Still, it's hard to let go of a book. Maybe I will find time for Gould's fish after all. And maybe I'll want to refer to those Nanny Diaries for a scene to share with a creative writing class. (About how to write a fast-paced but ultimately shallow satire of a shallow subculture of upper crust New York with a deeply unsatisfying anticlimactic ending?) Tastes change. Maybe I'll regret letting of Mr. McGreevey. If I just squeezed those books together a bit more tightly on the shelf, there'd be room for one or two more...
So what do you do with books once you've read them? Keep them all? Some? How do you decide? I'd be interested to hear.
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I have the same "problem" with books. Only a rare, few people understand or appreciate that my books are the objects that I treasure most, and that they don't just sit on the shelves and take up space. I return regularly to a good many of the books I've read, and when I've moved and they are packed away in boxes, I miss them. I need to have them out, and where I can reach them.
I've recently started culling the collection periodically. I got rid of quite a few when I moved to New York, leaving behind things that hadn't touched me or moved me. I find that, for me, the most compelling reason to purge my shelves is to get rid of things that don't reflect who I am. I find that when I have people over, inevitably someone is standing with their head tilted to one side, perusing titles. I do the same when I visit someone else's home. To me, the assortment of collected books says a lot about a person, so for that reason it's gotten a lot easier to let go of titles that failed to move me -- although that said, I tend to keep books that I had a strong reaction to, even if it was a negative one. I remember a friend wandering into the kitchen at Thanksgiving and saying something along the lines of "I saw this title on your shelf, and I'm wondering what you thought of that book, because I'm surprised you own it..." It was actually a book on current affairs that I bought when I was about 18, and my answer was that I probably didn't fully take it in at the time, and I really do wonder how it would read now. The book unsettled me at the time, but for reasons I couldn't fully articulate. I kept it because it did make a point, although one I didn't necessarily agree with even then. I was fascinated that he asked. At the same dinner party, someone else picked up a book that I loved and asked to borrow it. I regularly send books out the door in that way, never expecting to see them again, but thrilled to share something I found exceedingly worthwhile.
I keep the ones I haven't read yet, even if I've tried to get into a book several times. Some of my most favorite books were once in that category. "Teaching a Stone to Talk" sat on my shelf with the spine unbent for many years. Now it's in the other category -- I gave it away recently *because* it meant so much to me. I firmly believe that for some books, there is a time, and until it is the right time, the work simply won't unfold for me. And then miraculously, one day I start reading and can't put it down.
I have a dusty collection of recent books that were choices in a monthly book club of friends, but mostly ended up being books I hated. Now that you mention it, it's probably time to get rid of those. I need room for the ones that came home with me this weekend. I'm an addict without remorse.
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