The Joy of Unread Books
I am a book collector.
My husband is another one.
When we got married, he already had a considerable collection of books under way; when we moved from Florida to Washington state he decided to cull it down to a manageable pile.
We got a friend to help us out; hubby presided over the whole thing, sitting at a kitchen table, while I brought double handfuls of books – from the shelves and cupboards in the entrance hallway, from the long and tightly packed shelves in the office, from the tall bookshelf in the spare bedroom. I would pour these out before him and he would triage them into three teetering piles – To Go, To Keep, and For The Friend (the ones the helper wanted to sequester for himself out of that loot). We ended up with fully two thirds of our moving boxes being stuffed with books. Probably 1,500 books, at that point.
Because I knew that we would be moving and there seemed little point in moving my own books TWICE, I had yet to bring my own collection from New Zealand into the fold. When my own moving boxes finally arrived once we started nesting here in Washington, there were at least thirty book boxes out of some fifty packages delivered by the movers (and these included some hefty bits of furniture). We unpacked and sorted THOSE, and lo, there was another 1,500 or so, or damn close.
We have now been together for a decade. In those ten years, we have not ceased to gather up books. We are capable of walking into a bookshop on a random weekend and plopping down $150 on (new and used) books.
We now have a house which has a library off the office, an entire room filled with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on three of the four walls. One wall sports a sliding secret door that, when closed, hides the library.
From the office side, the door is, of course, disguised as a bookcase.
The floor-to-ceiling bookcase from hubby’s house in Florida is now in the office and stuffed with enough reference material – on things as diverse as a dictionary of poisons and antidotes, histories of medieval women, a manual on screenplay writing and a Chinese-English dictionary – to make it groan under the weight.
Another room has built-in shelves most of which are triple-stacked with paperbacks, and that room has other shelves where larger hardcovers roost. There’s a book case in the bedroom downstairs. There’s a book case in the second bedroom upstairs – a double one, from floor to ceiling. We built in another shelf into a wall in the corridor. There’s a shelf of large coffee-table books (on Antarctica, on China, on bonsai, on castles in Scotland and trees in South Africa…) tucked under what in normal houses would be a breakfast counter off of our open-plan kitchen.
There are books stacked on the piano, next to my armchair in the living room, which I am currently reading. There are books stacked next to my husband’s armchair. There are piles on the coffee table. There are random books scattered on the dining room table, next to my bed, in the car.
A lot of these books – his, mine and ours – have been read, and many are re-read favourites which have been read many times (I have a fat paperback copy of Lord of the Rings which is literally falling apart from being loved too much…)
But you will have done the math already and figured out a simple truth: we have not lived so long, even combining our lifetimes, to have read every book in this house.
There are unread books on our shelves.
They are not abandoned. Essayist Gabriel Zaid once wrote, “The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.” In a response to this, British writer Nick Hornby said, “With each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.”
Recently I came across another essay on the subject, Kirsty Logan’s “Confined by Pages: the Joy of Unread Books”**
Kirsty says, “An unread book exists only in the primordial soup of your imagination, and there it can evolve into any story you like. An unread book—any unread book—could change your life.”
She freely admits to having almost a thousand unread books on her shelves. She has not read these books not because she is afraid that they will not live up to her expectations – but because having an unexplored world out there right at your fingertips is a totally exhilarating idea. It’s an unopened map, full of places for you to go, and you can open it up to any page according to your mood and surrender to writers as different as Maxine Hong Kingsley, Samuel Delany, Norman Mailer, Mervyn Peake, Susannah Clarke, Michael Chabon, Lousa May Alcott, Louis de Bernieres, or some writer whose name you’ve never heard of but whose book you bought on impulse because you took a look at the back blurb and got intrigued (I’ve found many gems that way). It depends on your mood – Kafka or Scheherezade – and it’s ALL THERE, still waiting for you, still unread. Some of it might stay unread as newer recruits come into the fold and claim your attention. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re there, and every one of the books on your shelves is part of you, of who you are, of who you were, of who you are becoming.
There is a very good reason I gravitate to the bookshelves of every new house I step into. Those books will tell me more about the inhabitants of that house in five minutes of browsing than in twenty four hours of intense conversation. I have learned to Read the Books, not the innards, but their meaning in people’s lives.
Anyone coming into our house would no doubt be similarly enlightened about us.
Who am I? What am I interested in? What are my husband’s interests? Where do we meet and converge, and where do we each go our own way? Which one of is interested in ancient mysteries and crop circles, and which one in the histories of Byzantium and the Crusades? Which one reads John D. McDonald, and which one reads China Mieville? Do we both read Robert Sawyer? Are we both eyeing the same book on the crowded coffee table, like the last piece of pie on a plate, and wondering which one of us is going to make the first successful grab at it?
Yes, there are books in this house which haven’t been read.
They are waiting for their own rainy day, for their moment, for their hour. Or they are folded over the secrets which they hoard, and may never give those up. Schrodinger’s books, both read and unread at once, unknowable until they are picked up by a human hand.
We LIKE it that way. We will never be caught in the unthinkable situation of having “nothing to do”. All we ever have to do to keep from feeling bored and at a loose end, even for just an instant, is walk to a bookshelf and run our fingers across the spines of the books that live there, and choosing one we have not yet been introduced to, and settling in to become better acquaintances.
Our house is full of unread books, of dreams yet to be dreamed, of roads yet to be travelled down. It is a place of magic. Walk in through our front door, and you will hear stories whispering in our walls.
And what about you? Do you have unread books on your own shelves? Are you ashemed of them, or do they fill you with joyful anticipation…?
** http://www.themillions.com/2010/05/confined-by-pages-the-joy-of-unread-books.html
