Chekhov's Mistress
Book Slums
Let’s face it. If you’re reading this site, you probably should be reading a book instead, unless maybe you’re working; it would be too obvious to read a book, so you read about books (or maybe you know me and you want me to feel good by saying “hey, I read your blog the other day,” at which point you will change the subject to avoid an uncomfortable silence). But chances are you are a book lover and we share the same anxieties over buying too many books and where to put all the little lovelies.
My books migrate. On the shelf they are properly organized, more or less, and stacked strategically for visual contemplation. But so often, depending on whatever topic is on my mind, they find themselves strewn about the house. After they get a little unruly, I have to put them in orderly little stacks so that I know who’s who: “these I read on the subway, these I read when I only have a few minutes, these are my primary reads, these are journals I hope to get to,” and so on. Not too long ago, I had to store away a bunch of my books, but the situation with piles everywhere is still an epidemic.
I recently saw Mark Sarvas’ bookshelf photos as he readied for packing and naturally I was envious of all that book real estate. Comparatively speaking, I’m sure my books think I’m a slumlord. Now believe me, I love my books. I love them in that weird way, like those people that dress their pets and let them sit at the dinner table. But I guess you could say it’s a tough love. Alberto Manguel’s books have suffered too…
“For years, for lack of space, I kept most of my books in storage. I used to think I could hear them call out to me at night. Now I stand for a long time among them all, flooded with images, bits of remembered text, quotations in random order, titles and names.”
– from A Reader’s Diary.
Manguel’s book is something that I picked up a while back at Three Lives and Company and mostly sits on my “subway” pile, so I may have more to say about it later. In the mean time, we are obsessed with moving into a bigger place. Then I hope to free all my books held captive at the Manhattan Mini-storage Bastille and even put up some new shelves for them. We are moving to Brooklyn, although we haven’t quite secured a place yet, and the apartments in general have much more space than what we’ve had here. I’ll be much farther from the bookstores too, so overcrowding in the book slums should improve.
SCMZZZZZZZ.jpg” />
p.s. Related to this subject is Scott’s post at Conversational Reading on the Tactile Experience of reading with some good chat in the comment section.
Read widely, think well, and write often.
comments
No CommentsCreative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: Whither the Paris Review?
About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: February 06, 2005
- Filed Under:
Dependent Children of Independent Bookstores
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
