So many books, so little room...

I am amazed by my ability to focus amidst chaos. I owe this skill to my upbringing in a small suburban ranch home. No great room. No dining room. No family room. No library or study. Just one small living room, a kitchen, one bathroom and three bedrooms for my parents, my three sisters and me. In the evenings, we’d all settle into the living room, television blaring. My sisters argued or laughed, my parents watched My Three Sonsor Bonanza, and I sat in the wingback chair, tuned everything out and read books. “Get your nose out of that book,” was a refrain often sung by my mother when she wanted my attention. And I would wrest myself from the world in which I’d been immersed and find myself in a room full of people.

        This skill is handy in airports and airplanes, in rooms with televisions clamoring for attention and in my office, where the distractions are not aural so much as visible: haphazard stacks of books and papers, miscellaneous detritus brought in and dumped for later, to-do, to-read, to-file. My desk is 63x32 inches and usually little of its surface is visible. A vintage typewriter anchors each of its back corners. Other permanent residents include a lamp, books like The Elements of Style and the MLA Handbook, a vintage vase stuffed with pens pencils and scissors, a 3-hole punch, a telephone handset, a back-up drive and CD player, and my laptop. Books and stacks of paper cover the rest of the area. But as long as I don’t pile things on my laptop—which I don’t—I can open it, shove things aside and, just as I used to with books in the living room, ignore all the other stuff.

Eventually, something triggers me that it’s time to organize. Perhaps it’s the overdue tax notice, the original buried in a to-do pile for weeks. Or the fact that there really isn’t another single place to put the new books I just bought. Or how to fit the new hat rack into the room, which was the impetus this time. Who knew that a $22 hat rack would require an entire reorganization? But to be honest, we have to go back farther than the hat rack. To the acquisition of my latest hat, a gorgeous black wool felt that can be molded into different shapes and bears an impressive red label inside—Christy’s of London. Squishing the hat onto the hat shelf in the closet (that needs to be organized) threatened its ruination. The equivalent of one tall bookshelf of books needed to be purged to make room for the hat rack. 

What I estimated to be a three-hour job took much of three days. I picked up and remembered fondly those I had read and enjoyed, debated which could be sacrificed. Finally, I hauled eight bags of books to my friend’s used bookstore, put up the hat rack, and freed my hats from their overcrowded shelf.

Then I organized the books that had survived the purge into categories. Poetry books, books about writing, books written by people I know, books I’ve read and loved and may want to read again, research books for future writing projects, and books I haven’t read yet. I was rather astounded to find that this last group totaled sixty-three books. Books that I purchased with an avid desire to read and yet, once I got them home, yielded pride of place to a newer book that called to me. Something new and shiny and written up in The New York Times most likely. Or raved about by a half dozen friends. 

I suspected that I was not alone in this habit of impetuous acquisition. But when I asked several fellow book devotees to guess how many I had in this category, their answers centered around the number twenty. Not five dozen. Am I a hoarder? I prefer to think of myself as a collector. Some people collect figurines; others, coins or stamps; still others baseball cards or wine corks. And then, of course, there was Imelda Marcos. Shoes. Three thousand pairs.

     This unread stack includes many books I picked up at used book sales or in the remainders section of bookstores, titles I may never have heard of but intrigued me, or maybe I’d heard of the author, or maybe I liked the cover.

Take for example The Searching Light: A Novel of Conflict in an American University, by Martha Dodd. This I discovered in hardcover, replete with a tattered book jacket, listing an original price of $3.50 and published in 1955. It’s about a university professor caught up in the “loyalty oath controversy.” According to the book jacket, it “illuminates one of the central problems of our time.” It sounds timely given the controversy underway in our universities today.

Martha Dodd’s father was ambassador to Germany under FDR, and she lived in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. She was rather notorious for her numerous love affairs and early admiration of Hitler. She then fell in love with a Russian and became a Soviet spy. Exposed in the late ’50s, she and her husband fled to Prague where she died in 1990. I’m sure you can see why I had to buy it.

Or what about Anna Hastings by Allen Drury, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Advise and Consent. The fictional Hastings is a journalist in Washington D.C. in the ’70s, when women in that profession were rare. The dedication alone is worth buying the book for.

Dedicated to all those vigorous, determined, indomitable and sometimes a wee bit ruthless Bettys, Barbaras, Helens, Nancys, Kays, Marys, Lizes, Deenas, Dorises, Mays, Sarahs, Evelyns, Mariannes, Clares, Frans, Naomis, Miriams, Maxines, Bonnies and the rest, who never cease to amuse, annoy and quite often outscoop their male press colleagues of the Washington press corps. They’ve made it in a tough league—at a certain cost, of course: but they’ve made it.

“…a wee bit ruthless”? And the men aren’t? And although they “amuse, annoy and quite often outscoop,” they don’t impress? Who could resist reading what a man thought about career-women in the 1970s, a time when I myself experienced condescension and enforced tolerance as I elbowed my way through the halls of corporate America.

I admit to being swayed by Nobel, Pulitzer and Booker Prize stickers on book covers, which is how I came to own The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller (Nobel, 2009) set in Romania under dictator Ceauşescu. These are words from the reviews excerpted on the back of the book: nightmare, bitter, stark, disturbing, bleak, obsessive, evils, brutality. Perhaps why I have not yet read it.

Then there are those books I have started, then set aside, but still feel I should read them. I want to believe I’m smarter than I am, or more literary or whatever impressive qualities would be associated with someone who read Ulysses(couldn’t) or Infinite Jest (ditto).  Did I ever read a long book review in The New York Times and let it be believed that I had read the book? I wouldn’t put it past the younger me. Happily, the urge to impress wanes with age. Current members of this category include The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño and The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. 

The Bolaño book came across my radar multiple times. According to The Washington Post Book World, “It’s no exaggeration to call (Bolaño) a genius.” So, despite two previous attempts to read it, this 648-page tome remains on my shelf. I’ve decided to give it 100 pages and if I’m not into it by then, it will travel to its new home with my dear friend, the bookseller. 

     I found the Bulgakov book on a shelf at The Book Beat in Oak Park, Michigan, one of my favorite bookstores. It came highly recommended by staff, had a strange cover, and is, according to The New York Times Book Review, “One of the truly great Russian novels of (the twentieth) century.” Although weighing in at a mere 396 pages, it has an additional 16 daunting pages of footnotes. Also, the story centers on the devil and his henchmen out and about in Moscow, and I generally don’t like the surreal, fantasy, or sci-fi genres. But is “like” a valid criterion for choosing a book? What about learning, stretching the imagination? Trying new things? As with Bolaño, I’ve resolved to give Bulgakov a 100-page effort. After all, philosopher Michel de Montaigne himself confessed, “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them.”

My goal is to read one of these books a week. But in what order? I’m thinking maybe I’ll just go along the shelf in the order in which they’re displayed, which is by dimension. In which case, my first will be A Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, in a special small format Harper Perennial Olive edition, measuring 4.5x7.  Next will be Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, then Deacon King Kong by James McBride.

And until I’ve worked my way through this stack, I’ll try not to buy any more books. Nor hats.