Tending to my own bookshelf

This week's NY Times Book Review included a piece by Laura Miller entitled "The Well-Tended Bookshelf" in which she discussed the sorted collecting and purging pasts of those of us with bibliophilistic tendencies. She writes:

There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments. “I’ve read ‘The Magic Mountain,’ ” it says, and “I love Alice Munro.” For others, especially those with literary careers, a personal library can be “emotional and totemic,” in the words of the agent Ira Silverberg. Books become stand-ins for friends and clients . . . .

The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read.

As someone who was a literature major, worked in a used bookstore in Berkeley, and loves the look of books stacked from floor to ceiling and bursting from their shelves, I muse regularly about my approach to the books I keep in my home.

In college, I was a book hound. I grabbed everything I could get my hands on and then clung to them as though they were nuts I was squirreling away for a decade's long winter. The likelihood of me reading them was beside the point. You could never have too many books. And unfortunately nobody paid the price for this perspective more perhaps than my dad and brother who were recruited to help pack and move said books every time I changed residences (which, when in your early 20s, can be frequently).

Miller also explains in her essay that, "Older people, curiously enough, seem to favor the less nostalgic approach. When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential . . ." I subscribe wholeheartedly to this explanation and believe, not only that my book fanaticism was an attempt at identity construction, but that that fanaticism often prevented the very identity formation that I sought. The ability to answer the question "Who am I?" was often smothered by thousands of pages marked by great intentions and questionable futures.

Since beginning graduate school and happily entering my 30s, which appear far more conducive to maintaining a sense of self and intellectual confidence, I have successfully managed to simplify and self-construct by way of multiple bookshelf purges. I still occasionally lapse into a hasty book purchase that results in approximately 25-100 pages being read before I tuck it safely away in a shelf while the book mark I left in it permanently fixes itself to whatever page I made it to. But in general, I remain fairly discerning, using my Borders discount coupons and Amazon.com bargains sparingly, and opting for reading things at the library, in the bookstore or online.

But, in the spirit of Miller's essay, one cannot help briefly mention what was kept. So, as I glance around my own home, I find the following still adorning the shelves:

• My withered yet robust stack of Norton anthologies
• A handful of old Scribners editions of Hemingway that belonged to my dad (including two copies of The Old Man and the Sea which is never absent from any library of mine)
  
• Barack Obama's first two books
  
• Several hardback collector's editions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde purchased with my employee discount at Black Oak Books during my last year of college
  
• A small but growing stack of feminist-oriented texts such as Friedan's Feminine Mystique and Kingston's The Meaning of Wife
• Books I've read bits and pieces of and enjoy referring back to such as Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma
• Books I struggle with but refuse to give up on like Hitchens' God is Not Great and Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals
• A few books from college that have contributed to my intellectual development such as the autobiographies of Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill
• Two copies of Irving Stone's edited collection of essays from Berkeley alums, There Was Light
• Shakespeare's collected works
• A sprinkling of books given to me as gifts at significant times in my life
  
• And, of course, the 4 or 5 shelves devoted to all of the education and social science related books that I know I'd be a fool to part with prior to obtaining my doctorate.

And among all these, is there a favorite might you ask?

That would be my copy of Bill Watterson's The Essential Calvin and Hobbes. Of all the texts on my shelves that might say something about who I am, this one alone speaks volumes about the person I've become.

Cheers to Calvin, and his fuzzy buddy, Hobbes.