Random
The Dendrochronology of Packing Books
I’m moving in a couple days and this weekend I finally packed my books, a task which I put off for quite a long time because I was overwhelmed by the thought of transferring so many books into boxes in a stifling hot apartment with no air conditioning. I couldn’t delegate this task to my boyfriend because I wanted to go through my books and organize them in a certain way. I am a ridiculous control freak. Like most people who love to read I am a inveterate book buyer. I buy books because I read a review or because they have a pretty cover or because I like the way the paper feels. I’ll make a purchase based on a whim or a recommendation or out of spite to see if a writer really is as good as everyone says they are.
I bought Bright Shiny Morning because I love Los Angeles and James Frey intrigues me. The book did not disappoint—I loved it actually and have read it three times. I bought Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra because I loved A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and in my head that made sense even though the books have little in common. I bought The Dangerous Book for Boys because it sounded curiously specific and then I bought the Daring Book for Girls because I’m a Libra and the balance felt important. I bought The Book of Night Women because I’m from the Caribbean and Maud Newton said it was great, on her blog. I bought Then We Came to the End because I love writing from the collective point of view and I wanted to see if the book was as good as the hype. It was. I bought Revolutionary Road because the movie came out and I thought, “I bet the book is better.” It was. I bought American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld because intensely disliked Prep, as in, I have a visceral reaction just thinking about the book and I wanted to see what kind of reaction I would have to American Wife. I quite enjoyed it. It’s a slow, subtle book but well worth the read. I bought Gotham Diaries because I read in Entertainment Weekly that Spike Lee’s wife had co-written the book and I wondered if it was any good. Not so much. I could go on. For almost every book in my collection, I remember why I bought it, what was going on in my life, who I was in that moment.
My stack of books to read is not a stack. It is stacks upon stacks. Some of these books I will read for pleasure, others I will read to review, some I will love, some I will hate, some won’t inspire any emotion at all. As I write this, I am staring at a stack of books on the coffee table that I am taking with me to a hotel in Chicago. They include Witz (I cannot resist an 800 page book), Less Shiny (I will read Mary Miler’s version of the phone book if it came to that because she’s so damn good), Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life (because I really enjoyed her reading on Live Giants), and How to Leave Hiealeah by Jennine Capo Crucet (she had a kickass story in a recent issue of Storyglossia). Then there are the books I will read using the Kindle app, all of which I also had specific reasons for buying and so many of which I will be able to take with me without breaking my back. I will get through all this reading eventually but where eventually used to be a week or two, it has now become months and it thrills me to know that I have amazing writing to look forward to—that I will never run out of reading material.
I was surprised by just how many of my books I actually have read. As I packed I also weeded but only ended up throwing out about fifteen books that were sad and weird and troubling to own like one on multiple personality disorder called You and Your Selves. I bought that when I was feeling crazy, I guess. For the most part, the books that interested me ten or fifteen years ago still hold interest for me now though I would like to think I’ve gotten more Catholic in my reading tastes. A lot of my older books are mass market paperbacks–John Sandford, Clive Cussler, early Dan Brown, VC Andrews, YA fiction (OH HAI SWEET VALLEY HIGH), random novels about serial killers and cops with issues and other such thrillers because the only bookstores I knew about growing up were Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers both of which could be found in malls or as we considered them in the suburbs, The Center of the Universe. I unearthed a ridiculous number of Harlequin romance novels from when I had a subscription (yes, really) to their Romance Book Club, which, by the way, now has an e-book club component if you’re interested. I often re-read these mass market books when I want to get into a really good story that won’t require anything intellectually taxing from me. I do not call this my guilty pleasure reading because I feel not an ounce of guilt about it. My favorite go to book is Requiem for a Glass Heart by David Lindsey. It blows my socks off every time I read it. Yes, I have written a story with that same title. Another favorite is Angel Eyes by Eric Van Lustbader. Basically, I want to be a spy when I grow up. If you’re with the CIA and you’re reading this, hook me up.
There are the books I got into when I was feeling alternative and edgy (I enjoyed my early twenties by way of San Francisco) like everything Pat Califia has ever written and the books I got when I wanted to understand what it meant to write literary fiction (BASS, O’Henry, almost every issue of Tin House haha), and the books I got when I learned that good writing is not always what you can find in the most popular literary outlets (all the books/magazines I generally talk about here) and that good writing is sometimes challenging or strange and interesting or downright entrancing. Going through my books felt like studying the rings around a tree, seeing where I’ve been, where I hope I’m going. In the end, it was not a chore at all.
Why do you buy the books you buy? Can you see a trajectory in your reading interests over the years? Where have you been? Where are you going?
As someone who is constantly under threat of being crushed by her stacks of books, I absolutely love this post!! Thank you, Roxane.
But Roxane, how did you pack them? Alphabetically? By genre? By shape?
I’ve got piles of books all over the place. Books turn up and I don’t even know where they came from. There are books around here that haven’t seen daylight in years – kind of sad. I like looking around and finding a book I haven’t read in years and reading it again and remembering the first time I read it. I like thinking about the bookstores where I bought them. Then I feel sad because a lot of those places aren’t around anymore. I think about the city I lived in then and how I don’t live there anymore. Why do I buy the books I buy? All sorts of reasons, mostly boring ones, though I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book because I liked the feel of the paper. The cover, sure, but the paper no. Sometimes I get obsessed with a certain writer, go on a binge, buy all their books. I buy books after reading interviews but almost never because of a review. I don’t know why. Sometimes I buy a book and read it the same day, other books I buy and don’t read for ten years. I guess I just like knowing they’re around.
Anyway, nice post. Other people’s bookshelves are interesting.
As someone who is constantly under threat of being crushed by her stacks of books, I absolutely love this post!! Thank you, Roxane.
But Roxane, how did you pack them? Alphabetically? By genre? By shape?
I’ve got piles of books all over the place. Books turn up and I don’t even know where they came from. There are books around here that haven’t seen daylight in years – kind of sad. I like looking around and finding a book I haven’t read in years and reading it again and remembering the first time I read it. I like thinking about the bookstores where I bought them. Then I feel sad because a lot of those places aren’t around anymore. I think about the city I lived in then and how I don’t live there anymore. Why do I buy the books I buy? All sorts of reasons, mostly boring ones, though I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book because I liked the feel of the paper. The cover, sure, but the paper no. Sometimes I get obsessed with a certain writer, go on a binge, buy all their books. I buy books after reading interviews but almost never because of a review. I don’t know why. Sometimes I buy a book and read it the same day, other books I buy and don’t read for ten years. I guess I just like knowing they’re around.
Anyway, nice post. Other people’s bookshelves are interesting.
Great essay.
I have NOT bought books because of the feel of the paper.
Will you come back to San Francisco? Please?
I have heard nothing but good things about Frey’s book. I better pick up a copy. I like to support anyone who can survive a direct frontal assault by Oprah.
it’s hard for me to resist anything handmade.
The LA Times hated it. Which is kind of funny, given the “Who does this Midwestern shit think he is?” angle of Ulin’s review.
Great essay.
I have NOT bought books because of the feel of the paper.
Will you come back to San Francisco? Please?
I have heard nothing but good things about Frey’s book. I better pick up a copy. I like to support anyone who can survive a direct frontal assault by Oprah.
it’s hard for me to resist anything handmade.
The LA Times hated it. Which is kind of funny, given the “Who does this Midwestern shit think he is?” angle of Ulin’s review.
i like to rearrange at least part of my bookshelves every six months or so, if only to remind myself of everything i have, want to re-read, and haven’t yet read. plus purging means i can go get credit at my favorite used bookstore, so that’s nice too. i recently rearranged my shelves so as to be by “language originally written in” (and then alphabetical by author within each category), after formerly having things arranged by “genre” (as in oulipo, nouveaux romans, new narrative, etc). and now the stack of books sitting by desk at work is totally different than what was here last week.
Yes.
i like to rearrange at least part of my bookshelves every six months or so, if only to remind myself of everything i have, want to re-read, and haven’t yet read. plus purging means i can go get credit at my favorite used bookstore, so that’s nice too. i recently rearranged my shelves so as to be by “language originally written in” (and then alphabetical by author within each category), after formerly having things arranged by “genre” (as in oulipo, nouveaux romans, new narrative, etc). and now the stack of books sitting by desk at work is totally different than what was here last week.
Yes.
I’m moving (again), too and packing my books is so daunting (I wind up stopping to read this paragraph or that page; it takes days), that I hired my grandson to do it for me. Now I’m surrounded by empty bookshelves and closed and taped and stacked boxes and I worry that I’ll never be able to put them in order again.
Roxane,
If this article wasn’t bylined by you, I would think I might have written it, sometime when I wasn’t reading that is. Just had drywall hung in my house and the contractor bubble-wrapped my books to protect them from dust. I couldn’t get at them for a week and had serious withdrawels. You actually mentioned a number of books I haven’t read. The library is open and so are my two favorite booksellers. Thanks for further fueling my happy addiction.
I’m moving (again), too and packing my books is so daunting (I wind up stopping to read this paragraph or that page; it takes days), that I hired my grandson to do it for me. Now I’m surrounded by empty bookshelves and closed and taped and stacked boxes and I worry that I’ll never be able to put them in order again.
Roxane,
If this article wasn’t bylined by you, I would think I might have written it, sometime when I wasn’t reading that is. Just had drywall hung in my house and the contractor bubble-wrapped my books to protect them from dust. I couldn’t get at them for a week and had serious withdrawels. You actually mentioned a number of books I haven’t read. The library is open and so are my two favorite booksellers. Thanks for further fueling my happy addiction.
Thanks for the rev-up
Hmm. As one of your commenters said above – yes, but you never did tell us how you packed them! I’d pack by size (yes, destroying the order!), so that the books themselves stand the best chance of surviving the move without injury.
Manguel, in either The Library at Night, or The ABC of Reading, speaks of the individuality of a book. It’s not that I read ‘Alice In Wonderland”, but that I read the red-covered, large-format Alice in Wonderland from Dean & Co. with colour plates: very different from The Annotated Alice of Martin Gardner with the Tenniel illustrations, next to which, of course, I have the Penguin paperback Hunting of the Snark, which used to be adjacent to Hofstader’s Godel, Escher and Bach (because he has a wonderful German version of Jabberwocky) So, my friend, book x is friend because of a whole range of accidents – bookshop, binding, occasion, price, tram-tickets included in the pages, smell, type of paper – oh yes: and contents! Occasionally friends have lost my books – and they think they’ve replaced them, but they’ve given me the wrong one! Even Pan Books (you’d think a publisher would know better) ruined this with a change of cover style. My favourite series of science fiction anthologies was Spectrum, five volumes, edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. My friends were the Spectrum I, II, III, IV and V. Somehow my shelves have morphed them into Spectrum 1, 2, 3, 4 and V. I had to recomplete the set for some reason, but the Arabicising of the numerals, and the cover art change provides an enduring dissonance.
Then, there’s the attempt to complete a set by mail order – and they fail to tell you that their copy is paperback, not hardback.
Or the evaporating publisher’s imprint – what was Kegan LePoer Trench, then Routledge and Kegan Paul, then RKP, then Routledge – and now they are beginning to hide as Taylor & Francis! I shouldn’t even mention Harper!
I may not judge my books by their cover, but I know them that way!
I tried to pack them by category of book. Toward the end, I failed in this ambition. Still, it was great to be able to go through my collection and see what all was there.
Thanks for the rev-up
Hmm. As one of your commenters said above – yes, but you never did tell us how you packed them! I’d pack by size (yes, destroying the order!), so that the books themselves stand the best chance of surviving the move without injury.
Manguel, in either The Library at Night, or The ABC of Reading, speaks of the individuality of a book. It’s not that I read ‘Alice In Wonderland”, but that I read the red-covered, large-format Alice in Wonderland from Dean & Co. with colour plates: very different from The Annotated Alice of Martin Gardner with the Tenniel illustrations, next to which, of course, I have the Penguin paperback Hunting of the Snark, which used to be adjacent to Hofstader’s Godel, Escher and Bach (because he has a wonderful German version of Jabberwocky) So, my friend, book x is friend because of a whole range of accidents – bookshop, binding, occasion, price, tram-tickets included in the pages, smell, type of paper – oh yes: and contents! Occasionally friends have lost my books – and they think they’ve replaced them, but they’ve given me the wrong one! Even Pan Books (you’d think a publisher would know better) ruined this with a change of cover style. My favourite series of science fiction anthologies was Spectrum, five volumes, edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. My friends were the Spectrum I, II, III, IV and V. Somehow my shelves have morphed them into Spectrum 1, 2, 3, 4 and V. I had to recomplete the set for some reason, but the Arabicising of the numerals, and the cover art change provides an enduring dissonance.
Then, there’s the attempt to complete a set by mail order – and they fail to tell you that their copy is paperback, not hardback.
Or the evaporating publisher’s imprint – what was Kegan LePoer Trench, then Routledge and Kegan Paul, then RKP, then Routledge – and now they are beginning to hide as Taylor & Francis! I shouldn’t even mention Harper!
I may not judge my books by their cover, but I know them that way!
I tried to pack them by category of book. Toward the end, I failed in this ambition. Still, it was great to be able to go through my collection and see what all was there.