Bookshelf of the Month — May
A friend once told me that my house was so clean it made her uncomfortable. I just don’t like clutter; it makes me feel stressed. The one exception to that rule is books. I’m uncharacteristically sentimental about them; I keep everything I’ve read, unless it was borrowed. (Actually, I keep some of those, too. Sorry, mom and Alicia and Laura and…)
No book is just a story. Each one is an artifact of a class I took or a paper I wrote or an author with whom I fell in love. A Prayer for Owen Meany was the first book that really gut-punched me. Owen’s certainty that his life had a specific purpose and that he was willing to live it out, knowing how it would end, forces the reader to examine their own beliefs and question the possibility of miracles. It’s a spiritual book from a self-proclaimed agnostic author. I’ve read every other John Irving novel since.
Loving Frank was from a book club for two, just me and my friend Mandy. We each read the novel, and then she came to visit me in Pennsylvania, where we went to visit the namesake architect’s masterpiece, Fallingwater.
I read Lucky Boy, a story set in the United States about an Indian couple and a young immigrant from Mexico, around the same time that the president was dismantling immigration policies. I was studying for the LSAT and considering a career in immigration law. Lucky Boy took the faceless others from the news and created complex characters who demanded compassion.
Maeve Binchy’s novels have long been my guilty pleasure. They were fun and comforting to read, but they weren’t Literary, and I was supposed to be Literary. They are shelved next to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Dubliners because I finally decided to come out of my shameful airport paperback closet and write a paper claiming that Binchy’s short story, “It’s Only a Day,” from Chestnut Street is a modern retelling of Joyce’s famous short story, “Eveline,” from Dubliners. They sat on my desk together for months, and now they live together on the bookshelf.
A Little Life was the focus of my capstone project. The book resonated with me because it was a striking juxtaposition of trauma and horror along with immense beauty. I first read it over a summer, and later spent a semester working through it and writing about it. It was a project that forced me to really push myself and of which I am still very proud.
I first read Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection, Ariel, in what became a favorite class with a favorite professor. I was never a big poetry fan, but I loved Plath from reading The Bell Jar as a teenager. Annotating the poems and writing about them helped me to really feel poetry for the first time.
In some cases, I love the books because I have the privilege of knowing the authors. The Killing of Strangers and Tree of Sighs were written by mentors who became friends. While authorial intent may not matter, knowing the author and seeing their personality and philosophy through their writing is a rare pleasure.
Many of the others are novels I’ve read in a class, and some are books I’ve collected but not yet read. There is an excessive number of parenting books, my favorite of which is The Strong-Willed Child, which is missing a chunk of its back cover thanks to the strong teeth and jaws of my own strong-willed child. There are several Bibles and devotional books, too, because — clearly — when you have kids, you need Jesus. In the bottom corner there are a handful of travel guides that I may never use again, but serve as fond memories of past trips.
Each of these books was a journey of some sort, either personally or professionally. I can’t discard those books any more than I can discard those experiences. Call it clutter if you like, but I’m keeping them.
