Reading My Bookcase

When my carpet was cleaned this past summer, I had to move one of the little shelving units I’d been using as a bookcase for several years. Inexpensive and flimsy, it gave up the ghost as I tried to carry it to a room without carpet. Like Humpty Dumpty, it fell apart and refused all attempts at being put back together.

After I bought a new, sturdier bookcase, it occurred to me that this would be a great time to rearrange my personal library. My built-in bookshelves contain the classics and books that made an impression on me when I was writing my dissertation on Victorian women. They’re the ones that I’d like to think say who I am. The new shelves, I decided, would be reserved for current projects, and I’d put all my unread books on the shelf in my spare bedroom.

It seemed like a simple plan. Of course I knew I had a fair number of unread books. Every avid reader has them. But what I didn’t realize was exactly how many. They more than filled the bookcase in the bedroom. I had to shove some on top of others to make them all fit, and the librarian in me was a little appalled. I wondered how I had gotten into this predicament.

Well, wondered is not exactly the right word. I know how this happened. Every time I go into a bookstore, there is always one book that calls out to me. It goes something like this:

Book: Take me home.

Me: Not today. I am already reading two books, and I have several on my to-read list. And you’ll be here the next time I come by.

Book: Take me home.

Me: I said no. I don’t have much money right now. And I have so many books already that I don’t even have a place to put you.

Book: Take me home.

Me: Okay.

And since I’m in a bookstore (either brick or online) at least once a week, it’s no surprise that I have quite the collection.

I remember how I came by some of the books in the unread pile. I wrote my master’s thesis on Virginia Woolf and, in doing so, read the first of Leonard Woolf’s five-volume autobiography. Wanting to know more but not wanting to invest the time reading all five volumes would take, I bought a biography. But then I moved on to other interests, and Leonard was left languishing on a shelf.

The same thing happened with my president books. At one point, I decided that I could learn a great deal about American history by reading a biography of each president or first lady. I made great progress at first but got bogged down with the four men who preceded Abraham Lincoln. The biographies of Ida McKinley and Grover Cleveland, which I picked up in a used bookstore, have been patiently waiting their turn while I slog through the shortest volume on James Buchanan that I could find.

But I really don’t remember how most of these books came into my possession. I’m guessing that some were part of my tendency to read everything on a subject. So if I liked one book by Carrolly Erickson, I then bought them all, not imagining that I might just get a wee bit tired of the Tudors. Some were presents. When you’re known as booklover and an Anglophile, people often find books they think you’ll like. And I must have thought so, too, since I still had them.

And that, I realized, was the key factor here: Those books all survived several cullings, which meant that I had repeatedly decided they were worth reading. So it seemed time to do just that.

My first choice was an easy one, and a relative newcomer to the pile: Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine, a book of short stories by Kevin Wilson. I absolutely adored his novel The Family Fang, and a short story could be consumed in one night, so I’d be able to tell after just a couple whether I wanted to read the whole book. I did. I consumed it.

If the first choice had been a failure, I might have let my to-read bookcase gather dust for another few years, but, buoyed by Wilson’s brilliance, I picked out a novel — Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton — and finished it in three days.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised by my own surprise at how much I enjoyed those books. In both cases, I bought them with the clear anticipation of enjoying them. But as time went by, I must have assumed there was something wrong with them, sitting there untouched on a bookcase. And then that assumption became a hardened prejudice. A prejudice, like most others, that had little basis in fact.

But when I came to Leonard Woolf, I suddenly remembered why I hadn’t read this book. By the time I finished my thesis, I was irritated with Bloomsbury, exhausted by their never-ending letters and diaries and, quite frankly, their self-absorption. So it was with some hesitation that I picked up Victoria Glendinning’s biography. Within 10 pages, I was hooked. In most of my academic reading, Leonard was seen as little more than a footnote in the life of Virginia. Now I got to know the man, a Jewish boy in a country that has always been snobbishly anti-Semitic, the public servant in Ceylon, the husband who did indeed help keep Virginia alive to share her genius, and the man who lived many decades after Virginia’s death. When I came to the end of his long life, I was impressed with Leonard independent of his connection to Virginia. (But I’m still not going to read that five-volume autobiography.)

With three long-neglected books under my belt, I felt proud of my progress. But just as I finished with Woolf, a new mystery by one of my favorite writers, Louise Penny, came out. Then a book I had on hold was available at the library. While there, I noticed a novel by another favorite author, Tana French, which I had somehow missed. Then the holiday season was upon me. A colleague gave me two books about England — “I thought of you when I saw them.” My staff presented me with a gift certificate to a local bookstore. And I agreed to write three book reviews for the next month.

So the spaces in my to-read bookcase have filled right back up, and then some. Maybe I should stop feeling guilty and accept that this is just a natural occurrence in the life of a booklover. I need to buy more bookcases.

Tagged: Essays