I’m not sure what felt better, successfully defending my dissertation, or returning 120 books to the library and being able to see the floor of my office again. My bookcases were never been emptier. Before the days of tumblr and instagram and twitter, my bookcases told a story of me. There were books I had read in school, borrowed from a professor, bought in bulk from a thrift store or garage sale, impulse-ordered from Amazon, held on to since high school or before. A few years ago, I decided my collection would be small but high-quality; when at a thrift store, I would only buy first edition, first-printing works of some literary significance, volumes whose value might appreciate in the decades to come. I soon found some beautiful ones with healthy dust jackets–Doctorow’s Ragtime, Lewis’ The Great Divorce, Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name and The Devil Finds Work.
But no book is heavier than the one I haven’t read but feel that I should. I realized this last year, and so I packed up all the books that had been hanging around aimlessly, for years, and any book I’d read that I would likely never read again (which was the majority of them), and sold them. Then I made these New Year’s Resolutions (I’m just now getting around to them): 1) Read one book at a time. I’ve found this to be the best way to enjoy books, though I have only rarely practiced it in my life. 2) Finish books that I start. I’ve never followed this, but I think that if I know in starting a book that I’ll be forced to finish it, I might be more selective about what I pick up. 3) Check out one book at a time from the library. Read it. Return it. The same goes for buying books, unless it’s more economical to buy more than one. In any case, I’m not allowed to buy books unless I’ve read all of my previous purchases. The only exception to this resolution is when I’m writing a conference paper or article and need a number of books at hand, in which case I’ll borrow the ones I don’t own from the library, and return them when the project is done.
My identity has, for a long time, been entangled with books in one way or another. In my previous home, I had amazing built-in bookcases, from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling, on either side of a fireplace. Their shelves invited me to buy more books, but I noticed that the shelves looked better with less on them. I started boxing up books to make the shelves look better, then thought: Why am I boxing these up, and where am I going to put them? If I am not going to read them again, am I just supposed to move them from house to house, from shelf to shelf, from basement to garage to storage unit to office to office to office? I took the boxes to Half Price and sold them for enough to cover a couple of meals at Northstar Café (which was well worth it). I have often deeply feared ridding myself of a stack of books that I haven’t touched in years, but I have never regretted getting rid of them once I’ve done it.
In the summers of my undergraduate years, I used to house-sit for an English professor who had the quintessential house of an English professor, the kind you see in a movie. It was a lovely cape cod with dark, soft rugs and hardwood floors and plush love seats, warmly worn leather chairs, pewter candlesticks and framed rubbings of knights, a nice deck, Bombay Gin in the fridge, two cats who were everywhere you were, a swing on the front porch where I read sections of A Moveable Feast over and over again. I read a good deal while in that house, but probably spent nearly as much time just grazing on the titles and author names lining the spines on his endless built-ins, feeling insulated from the world in all that wood shelving and smelly paper and gold leaf-lettering. I think I still want to have that kind of home one day, once I live in a house I’m going to live in for awhile. But last year, as I was still on the academic job market, I couldn’t imagine amassing any more possessions than I already had, as I needed to be ready to move, perhaps every year for a few years. One of my colleagues had just landed a postdoc in Singapore, and could only take two suitcases with him. With the money he made from selling his books, he bought a new laptop.
Now that I’m in the city I plan on living in for a long time, I’ll start building my collection up again, slowly and carefully for awhile. First on my list is, of course, James Baldwin’s Collected Essays, the gem published by the Library of America, with its green cloth hardcover and thin Bible pages. After that, I’ll probably pick up Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, long-listed for the National Book Award and now receiving a deluge of critical acclaim, including a Toni Morrison endorsement. It will be interesting to read one and then the other, hear the echoes, notice what is new, mourn the fact that so much still needs to be said, again, and feel gratitude that we, by some mysterious and happy fortune, are blessed with thoughtful, courageous voices in every generation, who choose to invest those voices in books we can read again and again, live with, age with, carry with us like memories.