Podcasts. E-texts. Books on tape. There’s an ever-proliferating number of ways literary junkies can get their fix, but I like to get mine in the most unadulterated form. Don’t try to dilute it by slipping some technological wizardry quietly past me—just give me the pure printed word straight up, please.
Books have always struck me as being uniquely physically eminent. I get enormous satisfaction from holding a brand-new, pristine novel in my hands, but even more of a rush when I look at it post-read. Pages that don’t lie quite flat, a few dog ears, perhaps some underlines or marginal musing—all things that might reduce the resale price but increase the inherent value to the reader. Even though the contents of a tome might leave your brain shortly after you’ve put it down, you can still point to the cover and know that once upon a time you had an intimate acquaintance with the inside pages. A bookshelf full of your conquests can be a safety net, rescuing you from the frailty of human memory. I like to flip through something I read a couple semesters ago and marvel at the tangible evidence of what I once understood.
My mother inscribes every book she gives me with at least the occasion and the date, and I’ve picked up this habit. The first thing I do upon purchase of a book is write my name on the inside cover, staking my claim on the contents. I’m trying to slowly build up my personal library, buying rather than borrowing. I always admire someone with a well-stocked bookshelf—the first thing I look at in a professor’s office or someone’s living room is the range of interests on their bookshelves.
My own bookshelves are the focal point of my room at home. To the untrained eye, they look chaotic and disorganized, but I take great care in the placement of each volume. I don’t believe in organizing alphabetically, or by genre—too impersonal. Instead, not unlike John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity, I might make a pattern with the colors of the book jackets, or group by the order in which I read them. Summers 2003-5, for instance, occupy my top shelf.
I put the most dissonant works together sheerly for contrast. I’ve got Jude the Obscure sandwiched between Little Women and 100 Years of Solitude; Hamlet next to Bridget Jones’ Diary ; Ramona Quimby with Grapes of Wrath—I don’t believe in delineating between high and low art.
I might also take into account how I believe the authors would get along. Sometimes I’ll imagine my bookshelves as playing host to the ultimate literary shindig. I’ll seat Kerouac and Fitzgerald on the center shelf as the life of the party; give Emily Dickinson and J.D Salinger a quiet corner by themselves on the bottom shelf—perhaps an oddball romance might blossom? Or I’ll purposely create tension as I wickedly imagine the epic debates that would result from C.S Lewis paired with Nietzsche, Hemingway with Simone Weil, Wordsworth and e.e cummings.
Each book we read slightly alters our perception of the world. You can respond in kind, leaving your mark on a book as well. Learning not to fear inking a book is an important step in your personal education. I love picking up a volume that’s been marginally annotated by someone I know. I used to read my sister’s college English books and marvel at all the insightful things she’d had to say about Rabbit, Run, or Dharma Bums.
Even more than helping my understanding of the novels, I liked what it taught me about my sister. My father once told me that The Power and the Glory was his favorite book, something I wouldn’t have understood had I not read the copy my father had inscribed to my brother with an explanation of why he liked it. That, coupled with my brother’s own notes, gave it a triple layer of importance to me. I learned not just from Graham Greene, but also from my brother and father’s reaction to him.
Reading is an intensely personal experience, but the quick notes we scribble and the dashed underlines of passages become the enduring crystallization of a visceral emotion or fleeting connection. No one can ever treasure an MP3 for its loveliness of design or create a retrospective shrine to their education out of old podcasts—they just get deleted. Books as physical entities, on the other hand, can become an important artifact in the anthropological reconstruction of our own lives and our constantly evolving selves.
