We have books in our house. Stop press! Hold the front page etc etc. Well, there have always been books here…but stacked up in quiet corners and mostly in plastic boxes awaiting book shelves. Said shelves are now up, books are out of the boxes and are on the shelves and I could NOT be more pleased.
Well, that’s a lie. I would be much more pleased if all our books were on the shelves but the house is too small to house more than a teeeny weeny selection of our huge book collection. Ah well, a little of what you fancy does you good and all that. So, until we move again, we are living on reduced rations of books…just our ‘capsule wardrobe’ if you will.
A smidge under 18 months ago we packed up our lives and moved out of London, from a large house to a small one. We knew we’d only have space for a fraction of our book collection, so most went in to storage whist the lucky few came with us. What fascinates me now, seeing the ‘lucky few’ on the shelves, is which books ‘made it’ and which are languishing in storage. All our cookbooks are here (nothing to do with me, that’s MrSpud’s department although strangely most of them are actually mine), dictionaries (why? when did any of us last look at a dictionary), atlases, reference books for birds and flowers, books of poetry and, randomly, a bible, missal and a prayer book. There are books that we thought the boys might like at some point in the next few years, but the rest are Special Books which we thought we’d like to re-read to at least have around us.
All the books that ‘made it’ make sense to me. But what is SCREAMING at me are the ones that aren’t here. Where are my collected Betjemin letters? My Evelyn Waugh? My Mitford sisters collection? All my academic music books? My Barbara Trapido novels? My Penguin classics? A Dance to the Music of Time? The Raj Quartet? My Margaret Atwood? The Alexandria Quartet? My PD James collection? Jeeves & Wooster? Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow? Behind the Scenes at the Museum? Cold Mountain? Louis de Berniere’s stuff? Iris Murdoch for that matter? All my travel writing books…and especially William Darymple (although, phew, City of Djinns is here). My vast collection of entirely useless parenting books….?
And, much more interestingly, what about the rest of them that I can’t even remember now? Should I bin them when they finally see the light of day again, since I’m clearly not missing them?
To add to the ‘niggling’ about the forgotten books I’m now worrying about the 18 boxes of books that we gave away about a year before we moved out of London. We’d run out of room. A wall of bookshelves had to make way for a vast toy cupboard and the books had to go. It was so painful at the time but I couldn’t tell you what we got rid of. Now that’s a worry. Books we kept for years and years and then dumped. What if they miss us?And I might well be missing them if only I knew what they were…
Will this be a lifelong anxiety I wonder? Will there be a constant cycle of buying, keeping and releasing books? I suppose so. I can’t imagine we’ll ever have space to keep all the books we already own plus the drip, drip, drip of new purchases. I’m much better about ‘releasing’ books as I read them these days. Possibly a side effect of 18 months without anywhere to keep them. Plus a realisation that there aren’t enough years in a life to read everything you want to read, never mind re-read with any kind of conviction. So it’s better to read and release as you go, I think. To avoid the pain of those 18 boxes departing all in one go.
MrSpud has a friend who disproves of keeping ANY books. He’ll give you any book he’s read but only if you promise to lend it on, no ‘stashing’ is allowed. I admire this is a kind of minimalism, although it alarms me in equal measure. Surely books have a role beyond the immediate reading thereof? ‘Books Do Furnish a Room’ is one of the 12 novels that form my number 1 ‘desert island’ read (A Dance to the Music of Time)…the title comes from a scene where one of the characters is dispatched to buy books ‘by the yard’ since ‘books do furnish a room’. I think there’s no escaping the decorative nature of books, and surely their simple visual appeal shouldn’t be overlooked?
My books also double as memory boxes. Most of my ‘lifers’ include mementos from the time I first read them: postcards I received, newspaper clippings, programmes from concerts I attended. Actually I do this so infrequently now, a measure perhaps of how little I read compared with the Before Children years. I must start to do this again, as I’ve really enjoyed rediscovering these ‘clippings’ from Days of Yore in the past few days.
Interestingly, arranging the books on the shelves wasn’t the tortuous task it’s been in the past. Until now there has been a definite ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ approach with me and MrSpud painstakingly avoiding the mingling of our book collections. Then, for me at least, there has been a very defined approach to keeping author/genre etc grouped appropriately. Apparently we don’t care any more. We just shoved them on the shelves as they came out of the box, more or less. It’s making for a kind of literary ‘lucky dip’ approach but I think I live with it. More or less….although I’d like to state for the record that I am never EVER going to read the bloody Ring Cycle. Farking faerie nonsense.
Books which I will never, ever part with:
1. Four Letters of Love: Niall Willams
2. As it is in Heaven: Niall Williams
3. Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems
4. Edward Thomas: Selected Poems
5. Writing Home: Alan Bennett
6. Learning to Swim: Clare Chambers
7. City of Djinns: William Darymple
8. The Music of the Spheres: Elizabeth Redfern
9. Someone at a Distance: Dorothy Whipple
10. The Priory: Dorothy Whipple
11. Attention All Shipping: Charlie Connelly
There are others which should be on the list but they are in storage so, clearly, it would be a lie to say I will never be parted from them. Hmmmmm.
Me and books. It’s not black & white, it goes beyond that. It’s complicated…
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