Confessions of a Book Hoarder
What’s on your shelf?
My stack of “to be read” books is absurd.
It isn’t really “a stack” at all; it is piles. Multiple piles, multiple stacks, towers, in several rooms. A few of these are books I have already read but want to read again, like Eudora Welty’s Curtain of Green and The Letters of E.B. White. Things like that — things I have read cover to cover but like to dip into every now and then and could never discard.
Some of the books in my stack include research material for my second book, like Writers of the Modern South by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., or From Tobacco Road to Route 66 by Sylvia Jenkins Cook, but most of them are pleasure reading. My stack in the living room includes Gerald Clarke’s biography of Truman Capote, Last Days of Last Island by Bill Dixon about Louisiana’s 1856 devastating hurricane, and Gene Kranz’s memoir, Failure is not an Option.
In the bedroom, stacked near my bed you’ll find James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown which I’ve read twice but want to re-read; it is an under-appreciated masterpiece set during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It’s the kind of book I want to read with a pencil in hand and annotate heavily. There is also a collection of short stories by Vonnegut and a collection of interviews with Ernest Gaines, as well as the collected columns of Al McIntosh from 1941–45 who…
