During the weird, rudderless week between Christmas and the arrival of the new year, I packed about 80 percent of my book collection into boxes, which were hauled away for donation a couple of weeks ago in a white truck. As is the case with most things I do, I took more than a year to do it. In July I brought boxes up from the basement and then got a few more from the corner store down the street. By the time I loaded the packed and taped boxes into my friend Derick’s truck it was the middle of January.
Going through them was unnerving: here, I thought, dusting the covers, noticing how my signature has changed over the years as I looked through the ones I’d marked with my name, is my life. I kept my cookbooks, and I kept all of my dictionaries. I kept the books my mother gave me for birthdays – they’re collections of nature writing for the most part – and I kept three books I was given when I was no older than 10, one called City, one called Castle and one called Cathedral. For the most part, the rest of them went into the boxes with a speed and ease that surprised me at first, until it occurred to me that I have packed and moved them before, many times. I know how to box the books.
There are three reasons I decided to part with the book collection. First, I don’t like collections: I want less stuff around, not more. The second and third reasons go together. They may only count as one reason, but then again they may constitute four or five. Late in 2008, I rediscovered the public library, and in Portland it is a spectacular discovery, regardless of how many times you’ve made it before. It was one of the few realms I’m aware of where the computers actually improve things. A lot of the writing projects I’ve done for technology companies draw on the premise that the application or system being pimped adheres to the people using them rather than the other way around. It’s a lovely concept, I think, but I’ve never seen it come to life in such a truthful way as it does at the Multnomah County Library. In its physical rendition, the library is almost endless, but when you add the reach of the Internet it’s mind boggling. There is no need for me to ever buy another book, and that’s a great thing to know for someone as terminally cheap as me. My final reason for donating the books is that they weren’t being read because they were sitting on my shelves. That’s because I’d already read them. Books that aren’t being read, I think, are decorations, which I seriously doubt is what the people who wrote them had in mind.
So I was partially surprised, but also sort of giddy, tentatively, when I bought a little something for myself a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to Oklahoma tomorrow to visit one of my sisters, and I’d hate to have a few sequential days uninterrupted by the computer without a reading project. So I’m going to do something I’ve been meaning to do since the late 1980s: I am going to attempt to read Anna Karenina, which is considered by many to be the greatest novel ever written. I cannot say if I agree or not, but here are three things I know about Anna Karenina: I tried to read it in college, and I failed. I knew a woman who worked at a gas station that was held up while she was on duty, and she was fired when she told the owner, for some reason, that she didn’t care that much about the money, but that she was glad the robber hadn’t taken her book, Anna Karenina, in which she’d written extensive notes. The book I bought, not counting the commentary and the very graciously included list of characters and their affiliations, is 811 pages long.
Going through them was unnerving: here, I thought, dusting the covers, noticing how my signature has changed over the years as I looked through the ones I’d marked with my name, is my life. I kept my cookbooks, and I kept all of my dictionaries. I kept the books my mother gave me for birthdays – they’re collections of nature writing for the most part – and I kept three books I was given when I was no older than 10, one called City, one called Castle and one called Cathedral. For the most part, the rest of them went into the boxes with a speed and ease that surprised me at first, until it occurred to me that I have packed and moved them before, many times. I know how to box the books.
There are three reasons I decided to part with the book collection. First, I don’t like collections: I want less stuff around, not more. The second and third reasons go together. They may only count as one reason, but then again they may constitute four or five. Late in 2008, I rediscovered the public library, and in Portland it is a spectacular discovery, regardless of how many times you’ve made it before. It was one of the few realms I’m aware of where the computers actually improve things. A lot of the writing projects I’ve done for technology companies draw on the premise that the application or system being pimped adheres to the people using them rather than the other way around. It’s a lovely concept, I think, but I’ve never seen it come to life in such a truthful way as it does at the Multnomah County Library. In its physical rendition, the library is almost endless, but when you add the reach of the Internet it’s mind boggling. There is no need for me to ever buy another book, and that’s a great thing to know for someone as terminally cheap as me. My final reason for donating the books is that they weren’t being read because they were sitting on my shelves. That’s because I’d already read them. Books that aren’t being read, I think, are decorations, which I seriously doubt is what the people who wrote them had in mind.
So I was partially surprised, but also sort of giddy, tentatively, when I bought a little something for myself a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to Oklahoma tomorrow to visit one of my sisters, and I’d hate to have a few sequential days uninterrupted by the computer without a reading project. So I’m going to do something I’ve been meaning to do since the late 1980s: I am going to attempt to read Anna Karenina, which is considered by many to be the greatest novel ever written. I cannot say if I agree or not, but here are three things I know about Anna Karenina: I tried to read it in college, and I failed. I knew a woman who worked at a gas station that was held up while she was on duty, and she was fired when she told the owner, for some reason, that she didn’t care that much about the money, but that she was glad the robber hadn’t taken her book, Anna Karenina, in which she’d written extensive notes. The book I bought, not counting the commentary and the very graciously included list of characters and their affiliations, is 811 pages long.
