RUNNING OUT OF BOOKSHELF SPACE

May 11, 2009

My house is packed with books -- upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber. But my shelves are far more than space for “collecting”. My library is neither an addiction nor a compulsion, but rather a gathering of my friends, a kind of social networking avant la lettre.

I am a writer, a novelist. When I stall in my inspiration I have two choices -- to look for a word in the refrigerator (it’s usually not there, but other, more fattening things are), or to stroll around my rooms, visiting with the spines of my companions, and sometimes with their pages. It’s a lot more interesting than FaceBook to find out what Flaubert is thinking at the moment, or where Dostoevsky intends to go tonight.

It is not only chiropractors to whom spines talk. My older volumes are like snapshots in my school yearbooks. I remember exactly what they look like, their color, their size, their smell -- the messages they scrawled in my own, or even those scrawled by previous owners in their margins. Or I remember that I wish I had known them better, and pull a volume off the shelf to join the pile next to my bed to accompany my insomnia.

Why not go to the library? There’s no goddamn parking up at the university, and the public library is not deep enough. Yes, shelf-browsing is rich, but shelf-browsing at home can be even richer.