December 15, 2007
of the raking of books
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve taken three different loads of books to Half Price Books to sell. Probably about ten parcels in all, a parcel being either a liquor box or a grocery sack — they’re roughly equal in volume. I would like to say that I didn’t do it for the money, but I needed the money, scant though it was. (I used to work at Half Price Books, so I won’t complain about the pittance they pay, but I will say that even I was shocked by how low the last offer was.)
Mostly, though, I just needed to unload some inventory. It was starting to get oppressive.
I’m not nearly as manic a buyer of books as I once was, but I can still walk out of Half Price with six or seven volumes under my arm and think nothing of it. The money isn’t the issue; sometimes those books are only a few bucks apiece. The problem is that books are to be read, not owned, and keeping a personal library of books I was never going to read had begun to gnaw at me. I felt increasingly guilty about buying new books while their predecessors sat unread, and the booklover’s wall of denial had started to crack.
Consider: post-purge, I still own somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 books. (I probably got rid of at least half that many.) If I were to read one book every day, it would take me two years to get through the books I currently have sitting in my house.
Sure, some of them are reference books you’d never read all the way through, and some of them I’ve already read. (Not many, though; I tend to get rid of them once I’m done. I’m not much of a rereader.) The point stands: I have way more books than I can possibly read.
I’ve been acting like I’m eventually going to get around to them. Only someone suffering from a similar delusion could identify with my fantasies about being quarantined or put under house arrest, just so I’d have an excuse to get through some of these bloody books.
Bibliomania aside, there’s another reason I keep so many books around, and it has to do with keeping my options open. I mean, god forbid I should have to read a book that doesn’t exactly suit my mood of the moment. And furthermore, when I get an urge to read a certain book, I want to read it right now. Not an hour from now, after I’ve run to BookPeople to buy it, or two days from now, when Amazon delivers it. And don’t even bring up the possibility that it’s out of print and the library’s copy is checked out and I might have to wait weeks to read it. That’s just too horrifying to even think about.
All of which makes me a good American, which is to say I have a strong sense of entitlement and am easily discontented. Barry Schwartz can explain why too much choice is a bad thing — and I recommend his book on the subject – but given that I was born into the upper middle class of the most affluent nation in history, any limiting of my own choices is going to be self-imposed.
I remember coming back from Czechoslovakia in 1992 and realizing how battered Americans are by extraneous choices all day long, and I remember the revelation that followed: You don’t have to take everything that’s offered. Sometimes the best choice is no choice at all.
But if you’re going to make a choice, Schwartz says, the best choice is the one that you don’t second-guess.
One way to not second-guess your choice is to know everything about the ramifications of every possible choice so that you can know for certain which is the best one. Good luck with that.
But the other way is just to decide to commit to your choices and affirm them once you’ve made them. (Remind you of anything?)
I still find myself trolling my own shelves for something to read and then gathering six or seven books to take to bed with me, unwilling to commit to one until I’ve dipped into several of them. At times like these I’m pretty sure I’m less interested in reading than I am in being well read, and if I could just lay my hands on the books and have their contents appear whole in my head I would. This is reading as acquisition, not as interaction.
But the other night I actually opened a novel, Brian Morton’s A Window Across the River, and then read it through in one sitting. I had gone to the library looking for another novel of his, referred to as “near-perfect” in a review of the filmed adaptation, but it was checked out. So I settled for one with a plot I was less interested in.
It didn’t change my life or blow my mind or even make me think things I had never thought. It was just a well-written, unpretentious novel about believable people — New York artists, but still — trying to figure out work and love and whether one always has to trump the other.
And I sat up in bed with a book that was not my first choice and read until I was done, and not even the heavy reproachful slience of all those neglected books in the other room could stop me.