I keep saying that I have more time to myself than I used to, but the trick, I have decided, is to spend my time more wisely, and I have also realized that since I spend more time at home than I used to that I need to make a little more space. And one easy way to start this is to sort out my books. Some few I have already given away.
To some people my doing so is heresy, I know. If books are not sacred, they are important enough to keep. Well, mostly. But having fewer (and better organized) books means less dusting.
What started as a stack (well, stacks) on the top of the roll top desk is now a cardboard box of books I want to read again: Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. and E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictionalized telling of the Rosenberg trials told from a son's point of view. Montaigne's essays because I can just pick up the volume and start reading anywhere, pretty much. A couple volumes of maybe-the-last-polymath Stephen Jay Gould's essays. Dickens' Dombey and Son is there, and I also have a copy of Our Mutual Friend to read. I'd like to reread The Dalai Lama's Cat: The Art of Purring by David Michie, an introduction to Buddhism, and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have finished all of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run except the epilogue since I don't really want it to end.
And in various other locations in the house there are other books I want to read: Marilynne Robinson's Home and Lila, follow-ups to her wonderful Gilead. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. For Christmas I got a book about the lyrics to Beatles songs I would like to read, and I still haven't gotten to Klaus Vorrmann's bilingual (English and German) graphic novel about his designing the Revolver album cover. He autographed my copy for me in August and it has been on the bookshelf waiting since through no fault of its own, just as Krista Tippett's Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living and a collection of William Hazlitt's essays named On the Pleasure of Hating have been. Recently I finished both Martha Gelhorn's Travels with Myself and Another and a biography of her, and over the summer The Big Read was Claire Harman's Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart. These days I need to finish Tana French's The Trespasser for my book club by the end of the month, and about that time the U.S. version of Ian Rankin's tartan noir Rather Be the Devil should arrive.
My books, my passions: I have what I think of as the Vietnamese collection and the Beatles collection. A few books on digital photography and an assortment of travel books, Lonely Planet Vietnam, Rick Steves' Britain, and then some aspirational travel books (Latvia and Lithuania, for instance) and a couple by Michael Palin who, after all, has been just about everywhere.
I have some old-timey Nancy Drew books and some books salvaged from the family farm: Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Louisa May Alcott's Under the Lilacs, a book on sex behavior probably from the early 1900s (?) that I haven't yet opened, and a heavily annotated Complete Course in French. I keep my 1976 $4.95 version of Our Bodies, Our Selves just because.
I have a sense of what I don't want to reread or keep: I can tell you exactly where I was when I first read and loved Tristram Shandy, but I didn't enjoy it at all when I tried to read it a couple years ago. Moby Dick. John Milton. Most of Shakespeare except the sonnets. Donna Tarrt's The Goldfinch. A lot of the cheap mysteries I read and forgot I have already found a home for. But I have kept the anthologies that I amassed over the years--world, British and American literature--if only because hey, you never know. I may want to read something in them. Some day. I still have my Chaucer book stashed upstairs with the anthologies and my undergraduate German 101 textbook, also very heavily annotated; I marvel at the vocabulary list even at the end of the first chapter--eighty-eight words!--in those pre- CD and DVD days. But learn those words I did.
I have no shortage of things to read--so much to read that even sorting the books to make more space seems to be taking time from doing that same reading! And I have to confess that I have thrown out (that is, put in the recycling bin) some novels primarily because they have dark grey words on recycled-a-dozen-times grey-white paper and thus are difficult to even think about reading again..
And I do have an iPad, mostly because of its retina display which yes indeedy does make a difference. The iPad eye-ease resolution makes the print easy on my eyes even if the reading experience lacks the feel of a book--any book old or new: the the first opening of the cover, the flexing of the binding, the folding of the page corners. The smell.
And yes, even the dust.
Copyright Sandra Engel
January 2017
