photo by author
I have never been an adherent to “New Year’s Resolutions”. Rather, in keeping with my usual frenetic pace, I believe one should always be improving. Right now, I am aiming to improve the rate at which I process ideas, both as input and output. No idea can be properly understood without first understanding its placement within the corpus of human knowledge and experience.
Over the years, I’ve collected a fair number of books. I say a fair number because I’ve not allowed every combination of cover and title to accompany me in my travels. That being said, however, I do have a certain weakness that has allowed me to acquire more than is strictly necessary. It is a grand pity that every man will die with a collection of tomes on his to-be-read list; I imagine I speak for many of us when I say that I add to this queue with great optimism, an optimism that far exceeds the actual time I have to devote to reading.
I do not adopt every orphan that comes knocking on my door. And though the recommendations I received twenty years ago or more still burn unresolved in my heart, its surface now presents with a crust of patina. A preliminary sampling suggests I will look upon Terry Pratchett’s Discworld with the same quiet frustration with which I greeted Monty Python in my thirties; perhaps there was a time and a place in which I might have been receptive to the vision, but I cannot say. I recently saw some people on Substack discussing Still Life with Woodpecker, a book I did happen upon as a teenager, and wondered if it fell into the same category. If you have to ask, you’ll never know.
While I’ve mostly come to terms with the fact that I cannot fathom the irreverent fancy that pervades a youth’s attempt to understand a chaotic universe, there are other instances in which I am completely overwhelmed by sentimentality. I cannot bring myself to abandon a collection of novels placed in my hands by my late husband, often with little more preface than, “Here; read this.” Many bear bookmarks placed some fifty pages in, re-shelved many years ago in the shuffle of ever-shifting priorities. Kiln People seems increasingly prescient, now sitting quietly downwind of The Lathe of Heaven, Gardens of the Moon, and numerous works by Samuel R. Delany. I chew on a cliché repackaged by Lana Del Rey: “Later’s better than never.”
Unintentional acquisitions pepper my collection like stolen jewels. I think at this point, to return them might be more insult than favor, and I hope their lenders would agree. Death of an Amiable Child and Poetic Justice, the latter penned by Amanda Cross, were passed to me in a life I can now hardly recognize as my own. I have not historically consumed mysteries, but perhaps that fact, combined with their particular local settings, entices me all the more.
Trying to organize the books into groups exposes some of the difficulties of genre. Poetry, short stories, drama: these matters of particular presentation lend themselves to differentiation. History, analysis, and other didactic texts are also easy to separate from the others. But for fiction, where is the line drawn between literature and fantasy? Forgive me if I believe quibbling about whether Cervantes, Tolkien, and Woolf belong on the same shelf is truly tilting at windmills.
The bottom of the central shelf is still more free-form. Next to Flatland and several outdated biology textbooks sits my collection of foundational Icelandic literature, most of which were free gifts from the Scandinavia House on Park Avenue. One of the few for which money was exchanged is an unwieldy omnibus of the Sagas; the time and place where that sum of krónur was surrendered now floating in my memories like a distant dream. I had the finest nap of my life in that country, on a bed more akin to cloud than cotton, while the summer Sun refused to be banished from a blue sky.
A bookshelf is a chronology of where we’ve been and places we still aim to explore. When I was growing up, I went to the library every week and sometimes finished a book in mere hours. Looking back on it, my comprehension was poor and I mistook speed for retention. Required reading in college meant that for many years I did not often read for pleasure, but the lessons served me well; I learned how to digest rather than devour.
Adopting writing as a personal commitment has reawakened my love of reading. I will continue to pen my novel, but I will also dust off the books I’ve been carrying around, in some cases, for two decades or more. As I look forward and develop TCE, I realize it’s all another side of the same die: I want to get lost in a good book.