My life in books and other cliches

This image arouses me (blog.lib.unm/freealonzo/bookshelves.jpg)

I haven’t made a post in nearly a week because I’ve been moving my books. What might take other people a couple hours to unload and alphabetize a dozen boxes or so to me is a life lesson.

Gratefully, there’s no escaping my books. No matter how many times I’ve moved them, reorganized them, winnowed them or threw them across the room, each time is its own experience, distinct from the last. It’s like what Kundera says in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”  So it goes for organizing my books. I’m a different person, so my books look different.

And they’re in a new home. Bookshelves bought on the cheap-cheap off Craigslist line a wall in a subterranean chilly room that already is starting to smell of library basement and the reading nook in a used book store that smells of carpet glue. Deciding how to display them takes no time compared to the timesuck of lining up each one.

Like a scrapbook or a journal, these are emotional signposts lingering in my rear view mirror. There’s no way I could read Tom Robbins now as voraciously, uncritically and amusedly as I once did. Catcher in the Rye was great for letting me ride shotgun a few times but I don’t think I can read it again without car sickness, or to deviate from the metaphor for the sake of authenticity, an overwhelming desire to stab Holden and Salinger in the eye.

This Side of Paradise might have been written by Fitzgerald but to me it’s by Joe Solberg, a business law professor and wit from the first college I attended who gave me the book and said, “I was thinking of you when I read this—I didn’t get half of it.” Haven’t thought of him for years until I reshelved that book, which I’m pretty sure I’ll never read again.

So why keep it, right? Proof? Yes, Melville, I read you even though you ruined a really good book in Moby Dick. Control, putting things in its place? Yes, Frey, all of your Million Little Pieces are filed under fiction. A challenge? F*%! you, Ulysses. Duty? The friend’s book I’ll never read again stays on the shelf so that other people can find it because you gotta support your people. It ain’t easy. And you--I mean I--gotta remind myself, it is possible.

Some of my books have accompanied me over seas, across the country, and all over the general drift of my twenties, books whose first pages only have seen the dusty light; books which my tastes may someday grow to like, like peas: Hemingway there’s two, Burroughs I just can’t digest Naked Lunch and I’m afraid of Virginia Woolf every time. When will I read East of Eden? Before or after I reread The Grapes of Wrath? 

I pitch a lot of books, review copies that didn’t stick in my imagination long enough to justify keeping, books from garage sales or used book stores that were good ideas at the time but whose relevance has been squashed at the bottom of the pile: Buh-bye Cheever’s Bullet Park. Yet I keep a lot of books that I didn’t particularly like, classics and contemporaries, to remind me that reading what I don’t like can make me a better writer as effectively as books I love. Work that confounds me because it perverts reading into linguistic athletics—Nabakov you walk the fine line between brilliance and egomania—and writing that sticks in my head and corrupts my page—damn you, James Joyce, damn you.

Other books by family, friends and exes, who knew me for a phase of life represented by what I was into at that time: c’mon, I neednae read aul this daft Irvine Welsh; one-time loves who blew my mind with the eternal gift of Kundera or the simple story of a caterpillar.

Then there’s books that have less a personal resonance than a broader resonance with the world around me. Books of the world that I stumbled into that have deepened my existence thanks to Marukami, Martell, Marquez, Alvarez, Diaz, Cortazar, Solzhenetstein. A whole shelf of authors whose last names starts with M. The Russians.

Books I’m missing, either loaned out or loaned from the library and so entrenched in my mind that I swore I owned them (and must get now, not to read but to have): where the hell is my Mockingbird, and what happened to Something Wicked This Way Comes, a book that is evoked on every dark orange dusk of fall?

The back of a friend’s book kissing the face of a book by a literary lion makes me proud and hopeful even as I rod out the ridiculous pang of jealousy.

Once they’re all lined up, with gaps for the books on my nightstand or at work, a voice is heard. A squeak of insecurity, born of competitive fervor, a schizo ego, and my own impatience, becomes audible. The internal voice of self-loathing and doubt, tuned to what Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird calls Radio Station KFKD, a noise silenced only by the work of writing and submitting all the time, gets louder and louder as I look at these books, these authors until it’s a plaintive cry that I cannot stand, that petulant boob that whines, “Where’s my book, where’s my book?”

If this rag-tag mishmash of books spines is telling me one thing, born of the nostalgia and experience of perusing them all over again, it is this: get to work.

And now I get to do it all over again with the nonfiction.