Bookshelf of the Month, January 2018
Despite a lifelong love of writing, I’ve always had trouble writing about myself. So, naturally when I was asked to write for Bookshelf of the Month, my first reaction was “Oh my god, what do I say?!” I spent some time rambling. I overthought it. I wrote disconnected and irrelevant stories that had to do with books. And then, I deleted everything. I needed to focus, and more importantly, to just chill out. My whole life has been shaped around books, so I can do this… right?
My bedside bookshelf is a portrait of my college years. It’s full to the brim, and the overflow sits in various stacks around the house waiting for me to get more shelving. Some of these have been with me for longer than I can remember. Others were school books or research references. But most of these are here because they mean something to me and despite requiring some utilitarianism in how I shelve my books, I think this represents my tastes pretty well.
I’ll start with the obvious: the top shelf displays but a part of my extensive Arthur Conan Doyle collection. Sherlock Holmes made me an English major — an impressive feat, when at first I wanted to be anything but. Most of my high school English classes had made me averse to the subject by reducing reading and writing into rules and facts, and by failing to truly challenge me. When I completed my English Composition requirements, I genuinely exclaimed “Finally! I never have to take another English class again!” I would never have guessed that I would soon be taking them willingly. By happenstance, I read the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet (1887), the week I started school and for the next several years, Holmes became my obsession. Not only did I love the atmosphere of the stories and the mysteries themselves, I found myself utterly fascinated with Holmes and his way of thinking. At the time, I thought this was because I liked science and detective stories. I even wanted to hone my skills as an investigator so I could be like him (the chemistry textbook peeking out on my bottom shelf is a remnant of this stage). But time and experience gave me a new perspective.
Midway through my sophomore year, I found myself struggling to fill my schedule. I needed an elective and despite my reluctance to go there, I decided to look through the English section. Imagine my surprise when I learned there would be a literature class about Sherlock Holmes! I signed up as soon as I could and suddenly found myself not only excited, but downright impatient to begin attending an English class. And when I got there, it was everything I hoped it would be and more. This class was about ideas. This class was about thinking. And for the first time in my life as a student, it felt like someone actually cared about what I had to say. As someone who loved to analyze text, but until then had no direction in doing so, it wasn’t long before I realized I had found my place. I became an English major that semester. And I think the reasons why I was drawn to these types of studies goes hand in hand with why I love Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes isn’t actually about crime or detective work. It’s about stories, and immersing yourself in them. It’s about paying attention to details and knowing that even the smallest things can lead you to discoveries and intrigue. What I realized is that a worldview wrapped around thought and inquiry could be applied to more than just studying the material world. And studying people and their thoughts and ideas was where I really wanted to focus my energy. I now know that my interest in Holmes had less to do with its genre, and a lot more to do with discovering myself, and finding an outlet for the things that go on inside my head. And as it turned out, it wasn’t crimes that I wanted to investigate: it was books.
One of the main reasons I like reading is because books are like mysteries to me. They always keep me asking questions. They exist not just to be enjoyed, but to be devoured, analyzed, and solved. They have led me to become interested in things that never would have occurred to me, from compelling me to study specific parts of history to finally helping me understand math. On my path to an English degree I’ve also amassed knowledge of context for the books I read and expanded my interests as a writer in the process.
And the things I will learn from reading are never obvious on the surface. What surprised me at first is that some of my most interesting adventures in learning have started by questioning things I didn’t like about a book. I like to point out things that seem strange or undeveloped and try to find out why. This is true of several books on my shelf: The Valley of Fear, Sense and Sensibility, & Maurice (two of these being my favorites) all had some element that I found problematic and felt the need to reconcile with the parts that I loved.
The Valley of Fear in particular got me started on a journey that would continue to grow and change with me in the years to come. Despite being one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories, it has some serious issues with seemingly underdeveloped plot points. Namely, although most adaptations of Doyle’s stories would identify Professor Moriarty as Holmes’ arch-nemesis, his appearance in this story (one of his only two in the series) on the surface makes no sense at all. Trying to figure out why he was there led me to some surprising places, including the history of organized labor in the United States, the Irish Home Rule movement, and the notion of unreliable narration. Because these subjects were so closely intertwined with the Moriarty narrative, I started to see him very differently. Not only did he have a purpose; it was a very complex one that made me question his status as villain.
Meanwhile, Maurice and Sense and Sensibility go hand in hand. Maurice is a coming of age story about a young gay man in the early 20th century. Despite being written primarily in 1913 (and published posthumously, in 1971) I found it, in many ways, to be an astonishingly modern depiction of queer identity and alienation from society. The biggest sticking point in that assertion is Clive Durham, Maurice’s first lover, who midway through the novel suddenly claims that he is no longer attracted to men. And sure, some would put this down to sexuality being fluid or say maybe he’s bisexual, but I think it’s pretty clear in the text that that’s not what’s going on here. So how can this change have happened in a novel that, to all intents and purposes, treats sexuality as an innate identity? My answer to this turned out to start with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In short, Marianne’s journey from representing sensibility (passion, quickness of sensation) to sense (moderation, self-control) followed the same narrative as Clive’s transformation. Both experience the death of a kind of sensibility that manifests physically as a fever. Through studying the meaning of sensibility and fever narratives, and connecting this to gay culture around the turn of the 20th century, I came to a tentative answer. “Sensibility” was Clive’s mode of self-acceptance and losing that drove him to conform.
Answering these questions not only expanded my knowledge of history, politics, and queer theory — it enhanced my appreciation of the authors and their work. It gave me new perspectives on the world around me and the way it became the world I know. And as I learned these things I felt myself change, too. I learned from the past and from other people’s experiences and ideas. Because of all this, it seems like I discover something new every time I reread a book — not just about history or literature, but also about myself. A favorite childhood author put it thus:
“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.” — Cornelia Funke
Because it’s not just that I’m a glutton for knowledge, of course. I want to look at a book and see parts of myself in it. No matter how different the narrative might be from my life on the surface, I’m always looking for the small things that I can identify with and how those things change from one reading to the next as I grow and change myself. I’m not the same person I was when I started college and these books are a part of that. So when I look at my bookshelf, I don’t just see books: I see my own story unfolding and changing with them. Perhaps that’s why I struggled with knowing where to start. I feel like they know me too well. I get lost in my memories and the number of angles I could approach this from because in the end my books are part of me. And I can’t wait to see what we discover next.
