I am no longer proud of the number of books I have.
Twenty years ago, when I bought my first bookshelf, I'd sit and look at it from across my room and fantasize on how I would fill it up. I had barely filled 2 of the 6 shelves (even when I included my freshman year college textbooks) and many of the books were ragged paperback copies of Kurt Vonnegut, Bukowski, Hunter S Thompson and Jim Carroll. I had been carrying around and reading and re-reading these books since my freshman year in high school and I was reluctant to take them with me to college. I imagined these books as place holders, books that would soon be phased out by my more worldly, literary college acquisitions. I went out and bought a copy of Nikos Kazantzakis' Saint Francis just to get the ball rolling. I have yet to finish this novel.
By the time I left college, I had filled about 3 of these bookshelves with the mixture of often-read, half-read, and meaning-to-read books that would soon spill over into even more shelves and come to plague me my entire adult life. Two years later, when first I moved in with my wife (also a book hoarder), I filled a station wagon with my books, watching the suspension lower with each box of hard-boiled detective fiction or post-structuralist theory thrown in the back, thinking maybe this is the time to really sort through these books, figure out what's important, what I'm actually going to read again, and set all the rest free.
Three moves and sixteen years later, I was still meaning to get around to going through all those books, all the while the sneaking off on trips to Borders for the latest Sunday New York Times celebration or buying collections of mid-70s Jules Verne collections on ebay. Eight years of reading a book a week (sometime more) on the train to work, followed by eight years of reading a book every couple of weeks as a stay-at-home dad, had swelled my collection to a dozen maniacally stuffed bookshelves, with another 20 odd boxes of books in the garage waiting to be unpacked from the previous move.
Then the word came down.
We were moving again, but this would not be another (comparatively) leisurely staggered multi-day move from one Chicago place to another. We were going cross country. An eighteen wheeler would come to our Chicago bungalow door, take all our stuff (well, mostly books), and drop them off in suburban San Francisco. Time to face up to the books. Sort of. I jettisoned most of the books stuffed into those 20 boxes in the garage, under the logic that if I hadn't bothered to unpack them in 3 years they probably weren't that essential, and carefully packed the rest. I'll deal with them in California. Promise.
So after eight weeks of unpacking boxes and finding out where the Target is and looking for a job, I have gotten around to "dealing with it," I think, by picking a book a week for the next year and giving them a final read, again I think. My hope is that I will be able to read these books the way I rent a movie from Netflix - enjoying them in their moment and freely sending them on their way when I am done, ready to take the next one from the queue. My fear is that I will fall in love with them again, a fresh reading enlivening their presence on my bookshelf, making me want to hold on to them that much longer, setting the stage for the next crisis during some future move. Let's see what this year holds.
