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.

I have gradually come to understand, though, that possessions are a burden. I began feeling that my masses of books were no longer a comfort. Instead, they chafed at me. About a year ago, 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 few and I sold or gave away the rest. The intention of this blog is to examine the books that remain with an eye toward explaining–if possible!–why it is that these particular volumes are still here. A list of them is shown at the end of this post.

First, however, a few notes on method. (Scroll down to skip this part.)

When talking about the quantity of books we own, we need to be professional about it. The tried and true method is that used by interior decorators: linear feet of shelf space required.  By that reckoning I used to have about thirty-two feet of books. These days I’m down to a little over four feet–about fifty-two inches actually. (That’s still a lot of books and they remain a burden but not like they were before.)

As far as procedure was concerned, I went category by category. This had the advantage of simplicity, for I had only three categories of books: Novels, Other, and Work. The first two and a half feet of the purge were easy; I just tossed the whole shelf of Work. That made a good start. Now there were just two categories.

The Other group wasn’t very large, just three and a half feet. When I finished sorting, it was down to one foot: three inches of cookbooks, two inches of Lao Tze and Chuang Tzu, five and a half inches of poetry,  half an inch of H. L. Mencken, three quarters of an inch of European erotica and one tiny blue copy of  Euripides’s The Trojan Women, measuring roughly three sixteenths. So far, so good.

But then came the novels. I must have got rid of at least a hundred, maybe two hundred, all of which I’d read and liked enough to want to keep. My decisions were quick and ruthless. My criteria were…well that’s the thing. I have no idea what my criteria were. That’s one thing I’m hoping to recover from examining the books that remain.

So here they are, all 40 inches of them. I’ve put them roughly in the order in which I first read them. In the coming months, I’ll be writing and posting some notes with an eye toward explaining why these particular books are still hanging around.

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