Shelfie: Joe Milazzo Shares His Bookshelf
Joe Milazzo talks tsundoku, reading like a magpie, and the best used bookstores in Dallas.
Pictured above is what I call my “to-read” shelf. More accurately, this shelf is a small selection of books I will soon be reading, am professionally obligated to read (because I will be reviewing them; see Ondjaki’s Transparent City), or have recently rediscovered after browsing the additional piles of unread books that tend to mushroom from my office to my living room. By “rediscovered books,” I also mean those books I forgot I wanted to read. Re-encountered by chance, each of these old new books (or is it new old books?) has assumed the gloss of a fresh appeal, one I’ll call “nostalgia.” These books evoke that version of myself whose passing fancies and life circumstances — many of them still unresolved if not subjected to a commonplace indifference — led me to acquire these books in the first place. Perhaps this shelf is less a library than it is a kind of midden: an archaeology of the reader and writer I keep reimagining myself to be. (I am always aspiring to be a better writer and reader. Yet, if the quantity of unread books I own is any measure, I have a very long way to go.)
As much as this sampling of my own private tsundoku looks backwards, it simultaneously faces some future in which I can say I have augmented my experience. Perhaps that is why there’s no real organization to my shelf. The books aren’t arranged in a sequence, much less in a hierarchy. The collection does not progress left-to-right from “dying to read” to “will get around to eventually,” nor is it clustered around genres, eras, styles / schools, or any other attribute. Although I have a background in library and information science, I find that taxonomizing often comes after the fact. It’s only after I’ve read a book that I can find a home for it in the memory-palace-like architecture that overlays my physical bookshelves. Maybe América Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets will end up neighboring Marosa di Giorgio’s I Remember Nightfall and Felisberto Hernández’s Piano Stories. Perhaps it will find it belongs between Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations and the “chapbook box set” of Eight New-Generation African Poets edited by Kwame Dawes, with Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems nearby (O’Hara did, as he wrote, want “to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days”). In other words, I won’t know where a book goes — on which other shelf, and alongside which other authors and titles — until it’s one I’ll have to recollect.
But this shelf doesn’t rest on such dubious phenomenology. Like all writers, I often read with a magpie’s eye (even though the thieving magpie is, apparently, a myth). These books are raw material, the exploration of whose capacities and capabilities I’ve prioritized. I’m confident that there’s an abundance of genuinely sparkly things awaiting my attention in Phyllis Webb’s Peacock Blue, Ted Greenwald’s The Age of Reasons, Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Bastards of the Reagan Era, and César Aira’s The Musical Brain. (Am I confident that I’ll be able to employ rather than exploit the properties that are most jewel-like about these books? That depends on the next thing I write.)
I also read for research, even when I’m not working on a project that requires me to immerse myself in a particular time, place, or subject separated from me by some unbridgeable physical distance. Some of the books that have helped me grow most as an artist (if I can use that word) are works of natural history — see Eugène Marais’ The Soul of the White Ant, not pictured — or biography, such as Art Pepper’s and Laurie Pepper’s Straight Life. From a writerly perspective, books that wouldn’t strictly be identified as literary are full of surprising diction, imagery, and structural elements, not to mention the novel, often provocative ideas they contain.
I’ll confess that I picked up John Fox’s The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game because I so admire Rilke’s poem of the same title, and that the seeming impenetrability of ancient Sumerian religions (the subject of Thorkild Jacobsen’s The Treasures of Darkness) has long been an obsession of mine. Yet what I am most looking forward to having opened by those pages is heretofore undisclosed language — better said, the possibilities inherent in an unfamiliar discourse.
I should also mention that this selection contains a mix of new and used books. Here in Dallas, Texas, Half-Price Books remains our largest and longest-tenured independent bookseller. (We also have two other carefully curated used bookstores in the area: Lucky Dog / Paperbacks Plus and Recycled Books in Denton.) For many years, these retailers were the adventurous reader’s most reliable source for small press titles, in-print, and long out-of-print alike. Both Ing Grish, a collaboration between John Yau and Thomas Nozkowski, and B. S. Johnson’s unbound novel The Unfortunates are Half-Price acquisitions. This means that some other reader in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex once owned these books. Now, I understand that person may have sold these books because he did not like them, or liked them well enough but not so much that he felt like keeping them, or loved them but had no choice but to downsize, or… well, there are countless reasons why new books become used books. But — and this is the point I wish most to make — it is a great comfort to me to know that somewhere in my city, not a place terribly known for its bookishness, a fellow reader may have dusted off a shelf and placed these books there (at least for a short while) with very good intentions of reading them. Maybe it was that same reader who, in selling his copy of Warren F. Motte’s Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature 25 years ago (also not pictured), unintentionally expanded the consciousness and changed the life of someone still learning how to keep up with his literary ambitions.
