I'm Keeping All My Books

If you live in a world of ideas, books make that world concrete.

Last week, I officially entered the “finding homes for the books” phase of moving into our home. There are a lot of books to home in our house. First of all, I’m a big time reader. Second of all, I lived in countries where English was not the main language for most of my life, so having books on hand in order to have anything in English to read was a real issue for me. I might have mid 1990s or early 2000s life abroad book PTSD. Is there an acronym for that?

Over the weekend, I moved a bookshelf into my work room and populated it. For the past year, I’ve been making do with metal metro shelves which were deep enough to house the printer and a disturbing collection of metal index card files. Metro shelves are cool for lots of things, but they are terrible for books. Moving my books onto a real bookshelf, sorting them by categories, and putting them in alphabetical order brought me a deep sense of calm. Suddenly, my breath was reaching a deeper place in my body. My shoulders relaxed. So, to be perfectly clear here, I had a physical reaction to bookshelves. It keeps coming back every time I walk into the room now, so I’ve decided to call that feeling joy.

Temporarily displaced residents of one of my living room bookshelves

I’ve tried getting rid of books. I have gotten rid of books, looked through the shelves and given away books that would be easy to replace or didn’t seem worth shipping overseas. Every single time, regret has followed. A week or so later, I think of a thing or want to write something that leads me back to a book that suddenly isn’t on my shelf. A kind of “left my favorite bag at the airport” panic ensues.

This has happened often enough that my husband, who likes books but can live very well without dozens of them in every room, warned me off giving books away a couple of weeks ago. That’s love. I also suspect he doesn’t realize that the pile of books in our upstairs hallway is my second stash of unread books (the proverbial TBR) and that things have gotten grossly out of control because (1) I’m still hoarding books and (2) there are at least three awesome independent bookshops in Edmonton and (3) I am now meeting real authors in person and want all their books.

So, I’m working on reading down my pile. The first one I picked up was Belonging by Nora Krug, subtitle: a German reckons with History and Home. Loved it. I’m a sucker for multimedia art in print and this book was an evocative combination of old German Kurrant that is nearly impossible to decipher and precise printed handwriting in pencil on colored paper as overlays and translations. The story itself is painful and sweet, a history lesson wrapped up in a lesson on humanity and the way family is family. I’d recommend it and left it on the counter in the kitchen hoping one of my kids will pick it up out of curiosity.

But the reason I keep the old books is more complex than pretty books and hoping my kids will read them. My son is in the tenth grade and his English class is reading Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar. Over dinner he mentioned that Shakespeare was wealthy and that’s why he was able to devote his life to writing plays and sponsoring the construction of the Globe Theatre. I was unsure of his facts, so I went upstairs, picked up my college copy of the complete works of Shakespeare (of course I took that class) and took it back to the dinner table. We looked together at the section on Shakespeare’s life. It turns out the man’s grandfather was a tenant’s father whose son married the owner’s wife. So yes, money but also, did Shakespeare start out by writing from life? Isn’t his father’s story one of his plots?

The pulling out the book is a powerful thing. It isn’t just “I own an expensive book of Shakespeare’s plays that I paid for with my hard-earned college job cash and can you believe I carried this thing around on campus for a semester?” With a book, we can look up information and the conversation continues because no one is distracted by a link to the Globe Theatre or Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon. We aren’t racing to find the answer first on a device, we find it together. Reading out loud is underrated.

And then there’s the writer in me that had an idea about a rippling out of events as a way to write a thing and then thought, “Proust, didn’t he do something like that?” Well, that book is on my shelf as well (same era of acquisition). And I love that. I love that I can sit down on my couch with my dog one evening and read a few lines or pages of Proust and see if that helps me. I love that there are piles of books reminding me of influences and ideas. If you live in a world of ideas, books make that world concrete.

I have friends and know lots of people who’ve given up on owning books. They’re going digital or checking books out of libraries. I do that as well, but will remain steadfastly committed to my paper and piles. Those folks rightfully ask me about why I keep my books and so many, and I see their point. Part of me feels self-conscious and even guilty about owning and buying so many books. But within a few hours, I’m at my shelf, looking something up, loaning out a book, or just looking at them feeling good. I’m keeping all my books. They are the most concrete thing in a life where moving has been the main constant. At least I can take the books with me. They’re real. I can touch them, and that’s worth more than even I realized.