It Started as a Blog about Books

I’ve always loved books, both to read and simply as magical objects to own. The text of a book presents an entire new world, so owning a book is like owning a  universe in a box. That’s cool enough. But you also get all the accoutrements of the box itself: the ritual naming of author and title, the dates of the printings, and all the various sorts of blurbs and cover styles. I’m fond of it all and I accumulated a lot of books over the years. In terms of the tried and true method used by interior decorators everywhere, I had thirty-two linear feet of books.

I was coming to understand that possessions are a burden. I began feeling that my masses of books were no longer a comfort. Instead, they chafed at me. In 2017, as I prepared to change houses, I knew that some or all of them would have to go. In the event, I chose to retain just a very few. I sold or gave away the rest.

But how to proceed? I decided to work category by category. That had the advantage of simplicity, for I had only three categories: Work, Other, and Novels. The first two and a half feet of the purge were easy; I just tossed the whole shelf of Work. The Other group was took up three and a half feet. I didn’t throw it all out, but when I finished sorting, it was down to six inches: one inch of Chuang Tzu and five inches of poetry. 

Then came the novels and that was harder. Eventually I got rid of all of them. But as I did so, I couldn’t help noticing which ones were the hardest to part with. As I looked at them, I wondered to myself, why these? My attempts to answer that question form the subject of The Last Bookshelf.

1. Zane Grey    Riders of the Purple Sage
2. Philip K Dick    The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Clans of the Alphane Moon
3. Nathanael West     Miss Lonelyhearts,  Day of the Locust
4. Vladimir Nabokov    Pale Fire
5. John Hawkes      The Blood Oranges, Death Sleep and the Traveller, Travesty
6. Thomas Pynchon    Gravity’s Rainbow
7. Terry Southern     Blue Movie
8. Margaret Atwood    Surfacing
9. Paul Bowles    The Sheltering Sky
10. John Fowles    Daniel Martin
11. James Crumley   Dancing Bear
12. Marilynne Robinson    Housekeeping
13. Graham Greene   The Third Man
14. Louis De Bernieres  Corelli’s Mandolin, Birds Without Wings
15. Haruki Murakami  Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
16. David Weber   (8 Honor Harrington books, beginning with On Basilisk Station)
17. Mario Vargas Llosa    Bad Girl
18. Orhan Pamuk   Snow
19. Cao Xueqin and Gao E    The Story of the Stone / The Dream of the Red Chamber
20. Laura Restrepo   Delirio