With summer drawing to a close, and holiday reading hopefully done, an item on most to-do lists is likely to be organising (or reorganising) our bookshelves, perhaps even whittling down our collections to fit on our limited shelf space. And since most of us hopefully are not given to tidying guru Marie Kondo’s drill, the reorganisation amounts to revisiting vital questions about our reading selves.
For the record, here’s Kondo’s diktat from her bestselling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: put all your books on the floor, pick up each in your hands one by one, and see “whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it”, and thereupon decide whether you want to keep it or not. I don’t mean to be judgmental, but I don’t know any reader who would find this remotely convincing.
Composing one’s self
A more useful, and enormously thought-provoking, guide is Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books by Leah Price, a professor of English literature at Harvard. “To compose a bookshelf is to compose a self,” she writes in the introduction, and seeks out 13 writers to tease out clues about the self they expose through the organisation of their bookshelves. The result, captured along with lavish photographs in this 2011 publication, is an invitation variously to pry voyeuristically into these writers’ shelf space, to form a profile of their deliberative selves, and to pick up lines of questioning to interrogate ourselves.
For instance, she asks the writer and critic Lev Grossman, “What proportion of the books that you read do you own — and what proportion of the books that you own have you read?” He doesn’t keep books that he knows he will never read, he tells her, while reckoning he’s read a “high proportion” of the books he does have. Novelist Junot Diaz, however, sets the bar rather more high. Everything he owns, he says, will eventually be read, adding: “But naturally I buy more than I can read, so there is always a hundred-book margin between what I own and what I’ve read. What is cool is that I’ve caught up a couple of times…”
Which books on his shelves has he not allowed her to photograph, Price asks James Wood, novelist and book critic at The New Yorker. “I have a separate bookshelf for ‘unread books I want to read sometime soon,’” he replies, touching on the guilt many of us have that makes us hoard unread books in unseeable spaces.
On a dilemma most readers or book owners have, he preaches a “generous selfishness”: do not lend a book to a friend, just give it, as “you will never get it back”. And, on another question that divides readers, he owns up not just to writing extensively in his books but also to dog-earing. Grossman may cite his book-reviewing commitments while admitting to scribbling even in first editions, but Wood says he writes notes, to-do lists, emails and phone numbers in the endpapers.
His wife, Claire Messud, whose novels include The Emperor’s Children, is more ambivalent about owning books, likening her tendency in midlife to accumulate books to the smoker’s two-packs-a-day habit, one that is best broken for one’s well-being. She says: “At one time, collecting books that were my own, feeling I had my own intellectual and literary trajectory visible before me, seemed necessary and meaningful.” While sorting through one’s books and reading lists, this is an appraisal readers often forget about, to examine the arc of one’s life so far and identify the stretches when reading has mattered inordinately more.
With novelist Gary Shteyngart, Price brings up another subject that divides readers: the smell of books. Shteyngart is “big on sniffing books”, saying the old Soviet ones remind him of “tomato soup in a cheap Soviet cafeteria”. (He was born in Leningrad.)
There is, of course, a faint suspicion of being witness to a well-considered performance as these writers run through their organising principles for their libraries, their rough-and-ready tips on giving, receiving, lending books, their neat lists of their top 10 books, their capsules of their reading evolution. Ask a friend or the next person at the checkout desk at your library about any of this, and chances are the answer will not come in such a coherent whole. But then that is the biggest deception, isn’t it, to think that one’s reading self can be so cohesively profiled? So, as Kondo suggests, do put all your books on the floor — but only to place them right back on the shelves to find not how each gives you a thrill, but how the process of reassembling helps you know yourself a bit more.