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