Our lives, our books

A lot of people think of their personal book collections as expressing a sense of self. I have had friends reject gifts of books or turn down offers to join book clubs because they have wanted to select what they wished to read themselves. I have had other friends who only buy books in hard cover because that's how they show what they treasure. And increasingly with the advents of ebooks and kindles, I have had friends bemoan the erosion of value that our society places on the printed page.

I share all of these sentiments to some degree. But as someone who has moved too many times in her life, I have a rather odd relationship with books. They're heavy and boxes of them can throw out a back, so over the course of my life I probably have given away a thousand books for every year that I have lived. I like books but do not love them. If I had to choose between spending an afternoon working in my garden or reading a book, I'd probably choose the garden. That's not to say that I am a non-reader. I definitely read. But I read for work, for projects, for ideas -- not for mere pleasure. For that reason, I value books less for what they represent and more for what they can do. I prefer paperbacks because they weigh less and seem more malleable. I can write in paperbacks, take notes on them, and then pass them along. As is the case with music, I don't really have favorites. I tend to like what is resonating with my interests at the moment.

Lately, life on a shoestring has curtailed my book buying budget considerably. I have not minded this in the least. In fact, I have gained a newer and deeper appreciation for libraries because they facilitate my ability to read books and then move on. I feel less and less burdened by the weight of what I have not read than I did in the past when titles that looked so enticing and irresistible in bookstores start to carry the taint of guilt as weeks, months, years go by without me acknowledging them.

However, I always have admired my parents' book collection. For as long as I can remember, they have maintained a study, and the shelves of that study always were filled with books. As a child, I questioned their tastes somewhat because they had so many books with titles that I had never heard of, and seemed overly fond of collections with similarly embossed covers. But I do remember visiting the study almost every day as an adolescent and young adult, sometimes just to stare at the books on the shelves, sometimes to pull them off and thumb through them.

They are now moving from a large, four-bedroom, three-level house whose den is probably almost as large as the barn at my upstate New York home into a smaller, one-story, two-bedroom house in a retirement community on the north edge of town. I have spent the bulk of the past week helping them prepare for the move by working with them to "de-possess." We've trimmed down collections of furniture, towels, bedsheets, handicrafts, and cookbooks. Today was the day dedicated to the study and their collection of books.

Knowing that their collection probably comprised a few thousand titles, some of which had been with them for a half-century or more, I suspected that the process of deciding what to keep and what to surrender to children, friends, or an upcoming holiday church sale might be chaotic at best and emotionally painful at worst. Hoping to ease the process, I decided to try and catalog all of the books so that at least the immediate family would know what all made up my parents' collection.

The cataloguing took about six hours of typing, categorizing, and sorting. It was one of the most pleasurable things I had done in awhile because it helped me, perhaps for the first time in my life, understand how the books that a person acquired represented their sense of themselves.

In the beginning, my mother told me what books were definitely staying: a vast collection of texts on Hindu and other religious philosophies; numerous coffee table type books about art and artists; hard-cover biographies of American presidents; poetry collections ranging from Urdu couplets to modern free verse; and several shelves of books by Indiana writers. In addition to these, the atlas that holds our Cleveland, Ohio, home address on its inner cover; dictionaries and a thesaurus; and primers on learning Hindi and Sanskrit. I found myself feeling somewhat excited as located books that I had looked at but never been quite brave enough to open as a child such as T.E. Laurence's thick tome The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I also found myself learning new things about my parents as I discovered that my father had accumulated dozens of classic mysteries by Hitchcock, Agatha Christie, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, among others; that there was a Pearl S. Buck novel in the collection autographed by the author during a visit to Muncie in 1966; and that my mother had kept a book by Sammy Davis Jr on her shelves for many years simply because his words inspired her. She hadn't opened the book in decades, but looking at it kept her connected.

The instructions for sorting were fairly simple: Anything that my sisters or I particularly wanted we were welcome to take. Otherwise, I could remove anything that my mother described as "light."

I gathered up several classics, some "light" novels and short story collections that featured South Asian Americans, and some books written by former Seattle Times colleagues that I had given my parents as gifts. I also found myself drawn toward the numerous collections published by the Great Books Foundation that my parents had amassed in the forty or so years that they participated in these clubs. Great Books had always been a mystery moniker to me as a child, much like the Masonic Lodge or Elks, it seemed to require some sort of secret password for admission. Finally, about ten years ago, my parents dispelled the mystique by allowing me to accompany them to one of their Great Books gatherings. I discovered that their group included several longtime friends they had met through Ball State University and that the participants had long ceased reading the series texts and were focusing more and more on collections of best short stories and essays published in yearly compilations. The meetings included a potluck, with the host always ensuring a vegetarian dish would be available for my parents.

As I was sorting and sifting, my dad came in. He's a bit taller so I enlisted his help in reaching some books on higher shelves. He revealed that his opinion of "light" differed somewhat from my mother's. She wanted me to keep the John Grisham novels for him. He said he had lost interest in those books but didn't want to part with Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. He also gestured toward the Great Books collections.

"We won't be taking these, of course," he said.

I verified his statement with my mother.

And, I chose them for myself. I'm not quite sure when (or if) I'll read them, but I do like the idea of having that piece of their past brought into my present.