Cherished Books

I just moved, hired a company to do it for me because … well, because I just have too many damn books to move, and there is nothing heavier than a box of books.

My former apartment was a 5th floor walkup, as well. I had 22 boxes of books to be moved!

The moving guys were great. Filled with good-humor. But they also worked their asses off. When they saw the stack of boxes with “BOOKS” written on the side of each box, they knew it would be a long tough day. One guy, Victor, (who was very amusing, we pulled up in front of my new apartment, and he informed me, rather cheerfully, “I lost my virginity in an apartment right across the street!”) – but anyway, Victor kept teasing me, saying, “Go to the LIBRARY. Read a book and then GIVE IT AWAY!”

The other mover, Bill, a big burly redheaded cutie (had a bit of a crush on him, I must admit) – heaved two of the boxes up onto his meaty shoulders, with this beleaguered look on his face, then he turned to me and said flatly, “Just tell me that at least SOME of these books are Stephen King.”

Thank goodness I was able to answer in the affirmative. Then followed a very interesting conversation (he standing there, with two huge boxes on his shoulders) about It versus The Stand versus Salem’s Lot.

One of my more constant activities in my life is weeding through the stacks of books I own, and getting rid of non-essentials. You may be surprised at how difficult this is. I have to get into a very cold-hearted mood. Turn a deaf ear to all of the instincts rising up in me, shrieking: “You might read this book someday! So-and-so LOVED this book!”

But there are the tried-and-true favorites, books I will never discard.

I’m one of those people who loves to underline passages that catch my fancy, (not just philosophical passages, but descriptive passages, humorous passages) – so my copy of Catcher in the Rye is literally falling apart at the seams, held together with tape, with little underlines and asterisks in the margins throughout. It’s like a code to decipher. These are markings from various times in my life, since I’ve probably read the book 5 or 6 times, and each time I do, I find something new, another door opens, my understanding is a bit deeper. So I can’t get rid of that dog-eared copy! It means the world to me!

Other cherished books:

— my hard-bound ancient copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Red leather cover, with a gold stamp of the white rabbit checking his watch on the front. The pages are smooth, almost shiny, and thick – obviously a quality book, made a long time ago.

— my dog-eared taped-together copy of Mating: A Novel by Norman Rush – so written on and worked over that I could never lend it to someone. I have read that book 10 times probably. The notes I have scribbled in the margins or in the blank pages in the back are like stepping-stones through time.

— my falling-apart copy of Catch-22. Only read that awesome book once, and I think it’s time I took it up again. One of the best books ever written, in my opinion. What an achievement.

— my taped-together copy of Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley, another all-time fave. I just don’t want to go and get a spanking new copy … That book, with coffee stains on some of the pages, underlines, notes to myself … is precious.

— my 4 Nancy Lemann books: The Ritz Of The Bayou – The New Orleans Adventures Of A Young Novelist Covering The Trials Of The Governor Of Louisiana…, Lives of the Saints, Sportsman’s Paradise, and The Fiery Pantheon: A Novel. She is a wonderful writer, so funny, so terrific – and her books are very hard to find. I got half of those for half-price at The Strand, and I fear that if I lose them I will never track them down again. Happily, she just came out with a new book called Malaise, which is due out in paperback sometime next month. Love her.

— all my Lucy Maud Montgomery books. I probably have 40 of them. From the entirety of the Anne of Green Gables series all the way down to her recently-unearthed TERRIBLE short stories. Cannot get rid of one of those little books. It would hurt too much.

— all my Madeleine L’Engle books. I have every single one the woman ever wrote. From her phenomenal fiction: A Wrinkle in Time, plus the many many many others – to her non-fiction memoir-style books (total favorites of mine), down to her theological writing, which sometimes goes off the deep end for me, but I don’t care. If Madeleine L’Engle wrote it, I want it.

— my massive Collected Works of Jane Austen – all her novels in one volume. A huge tome. Also kind of falling apart, but beautiful, old-fashioned-looking.

— my copy of Moby Dick, another one of my all-time favorite reading experiences. The book was almost TOO dense, TOO rich, TOO good. I could barely deal with it. Every sentence coming at me was so brilliant, so unbelievable … I felt like I needed a break, a break to just deal with the brilliance. It’s like how my cat Sammy used to eat sometimes: he would get so overwhelmed at all the goodies put before him, so discombobbled, that he would sink into a state of paralysis – staring at his bowl of food with intense anxiety. Reading Moby Dick was like that for me.

— my collected poems of Sylvia Plath. Had since I was in high school, when the Plath mania began. The Plath mania has calmed down, thank the good Lord, but I still love her poems, and love to read through them from time to time. I know a couple by heart. That book, again filled with my high-school-age jottings, is a piece of my own personal history.

These books are not just books to me. They have become part of my own biography.

A book that can do that is a great book indeed.