“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”—Cicero
Books, books, books. They’re everywhere, and I can’t keep them out of my house, off my Kindle, or out of my earplugs. I was an English major in college because I was a voracious reader from an early age; when I was eight, I read Little Women up in the crook of a crabapple tree while other kids played games on the ground below me. I typed out my first book, about spending a week with the Jackson 5 after winning a contest when I was eleven. Although I like to write, reading changed the direction of my life.
There are books in every room in our house except for the bathrooms. Cookbooks in the kitchen, classics in the living room, rock & roll biographies in the family room amongst all the music, my private collection in my studio (the largest number in all the house), bedside books in all three bedrooms. They provide the soul in those rooms, as if the words are seeping into our essence, and the writers are with us. I feel them now as I type.
In my effort to declutter, I can’t avoid books. In my studio, they fill my father’s floor to ceiling bookcases, pile up on my desk, and sit in stacks on the floor next to my oversized chair. In our living room, they pack into my maternal grandmother’s china cabinet and the plant table next to my deceased mother’s armchair. The living room’s stack of books I plan to read next is twelve books tall—thank goodness most of them were borrowed from the library.
The New York Times recently published an opinion piece about how we should NOT get rid of books because of how meaningful they are. That gave me pause. We are what we read. Now I had a pathway to choosing books that I can part with. That led me in several directions of reflection.
Books represent many things. Some books are for reference. When I want to draw a bird, I reach for Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles. When I need to know how to whether magazine names are within quotes or italics, I pull my Strunk & White’s Elements of Style off a shelf. When it’s time to cultivate native bushes, I turn to gardening books. I might reach for an atlas when planning a road trip. Books on yoga and mindfulness also fall into the reference category. I often return to Judith Lasatar’s book Living Your Yoga and BKS Iyengar’s Light on Yoga. Thomas Merton’s thoughts on God and love take me closer to my spiritual center—I want the ability to read his words on ear-marked pages.
And then there are the memories. I cannot part with The Riverside Shakespeare compendium because it represents the three Shakespeare courses I took in college. I will not let go of any book written by Hemingway because I’m a fan (even though he was a chauvinist, but then again, he was the product of his time and in need of attention). My father and I wrote books that should be part of a family archive, if I had one. Some books, like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre are keepers just because they are classics and I loved them as much as I loved reading Little Women when I was eight.
Local author’s books are almost a mini-library—it’s part of my own writing journey to attend readings and buy autographed books—and some writers, like Anthony Doerr, are an inspiration. I know many of the writers personally and know how committed they are to craft and how much effort they put into their stories. At the very least, I’ll read the books so I can tell my writing colleagues how their words moved me.
As this essay progresses, I’m thinking about the books that changed me. The books of Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Gilbert, Fredrick Backman, Kristin Hannah and Ian McEwan have stayed with me. Stories of a grandmother’s wish to apologize to those she hurt, the Alaskan wilderness embraced by vagabonds of 1970s, and a philosophical Saturday like none other. As I write, am I borrowing from them somehow? Have their words become part of my psyche, part of my heart, felt in my body? Will I read Flight Behavior again? How about paperback copies of George Elliot’s Middlemarch and Geraldine Brooks’ March?
The books that have changed me include those I read prior to and during “big” trips, which include Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Paula McLain’s Circling the Sun during my Kenyan tour. Prior to my trip to Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia, I read several Isabel Allende’s books, including House of Spirits, and got a real feel for the region by reading The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann. Then there are books about journeys, like Bill Bryson hiking the Appalachian trail, John Muir’s account of his first summer in the Sierras, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that all influenced where and how I traveled.
In my book group, we read about the powder puff women’s aviation competitions that took place in 1929 (Powder Puff Derby of 1929: The True Story of the First Women’s Cross-Country Air Race by Gene Nora Jessen), which was insightful, but I don’t need it in my personal collection. The Briar Club documented the lives of characters living in a boarding house in the 1950s—I don’t need to keep that one either. We read a lot of historical fiction and while I’m interested in what I learn about living in different times, most of them don’t need to be kept. It depends.
I have at least a hundred books I’ve never opened, bought on a whim because I had to have them. I must consider whether they will ever be read. Book decluttering has become for me an exercise like Marie Kondo’s advice in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Did the book change me? Will I want to read it again? Does it stir memories? Are they books by local writers? Do I need it as a reference?
The process of getting rid of books can be demystified and feel not so daunting when I pay attention to how they affect me. Does the book mean enough to me that I should keep it? What the culling will achieve is a library that shows the shape of my life, the essential me. Books have made me who I am in many ways. A life in books.
2 Responses to “What To Do About All Those Books by Claudia J. Taller”
Brenda L. Elkins-Wylie
I like you, love to read, my favorite being mysteries, I was an avid read, and in school, I always read more of my class books, then was required, more times than not, in grade school, after answering questions ,about a story, when i was time to go to the next story, I had already read i, eventually , the teacher learned to ask me, how many stories I had read, so now at 66 yrs. old I find myself, with a lot of books, I probably will never read, so I’ve been giving some of them away, and keeping my favorite ones, no easy, but logical.
Mark F McCarthy
I have no website or social media whatsoever. I have never had a job interview or a resume. I have been a serious collector and bibliophile since age 8. Books are written and bought to be shared and reflected upon communally with others and not hoarded by individuals and locked away away from reading and study by others. Those untouched or not picked up and consulted should be given to community libraries , schools, senior centers or emerging countries or communities without reading assets . Those important to your story and journey should be kept in your personal library often revisited and handed to like others who have similar interests