Monday morning, my husband yells at me to turn on KQED because there is an article about books you can’t get rid of. In his words, “you HAVE to listen to it, it’s about you!” As I listened to Richard Friedlander’s two minute perspective on his books, my husband looks at me expectantly. “So?” he asks. I shook my head in disagreement. “That’s not me.” I said. “But I can definitely relate”. You can listen to the broadcast here.
Friedlander says of his old books: “I haven’t looked at any of the chosen few for years. They’re not me. They’re who I have been. My wax museum of former loves. Some day, yes, I might flip through one and re-experience something I once thought important enough to save. But looking back has never worked for me.” He ends with saying that he doesn’t know what to do with them anymore and they don’t really mean anything to him. On this point, we greatly differ.
My books are kept on my shelf in the office I share with my husband. They are me, that’s the point, that’s why they made the cut and didn’t get sent to the goodwill or library. I, like Friedlander, wonder what guests might think if they explored my little shelf, but then again, I never let anyone into my office. So unfortunately, they probably wouldn’t get a chance to search the shelves to make a psychoanalysis of who I am based on the strange mixture of genres.
Former loves? My love affair with these books is constant. I am obsessed with my shelf, I organize it and re-organize it, as if it’s special order that is known only to me makes a difference to my current state of affairs. Sometimes they are in backwards alphabetically order (a hold over from my childhood obsession with having a left-handed friendly library), sometimes they are in order of favorites, but currently they are in order of classy to trashy. So where once Pride & Prejudice , Twilight, Bill Clinton’s My Life, and Stephen King’s Everything’s Eventual all sat side by side; now Jane Austen rules the top shelf roost with Flannery O’Connor and Homer, while Stephenie Meyers sulks down with Jodi Picoult, Eva Ibbotson, and some Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels (yes, seriously). I won’t even discuss the current location of King or Gaiman, they have their own special shelves which causes me a constant stress. I seriously feel like I am hurting the books feelings if I feel their location is unfair.
I kept them because not only do I feel the books on this shelf define me, either now or as the person I once was, but because I do read them over and over again. No joke. I really have read The Stand four, no, maybe six times. I will just open Emma or Pride & Prejudice to random pages and start reading, Vonnegut and O’Connor are for rainy days. Who hasn’t re-reader The Oddesey or Idylls of the King? Ok, I’ll admit I may be a little nerdy there.
My husband says I am much younger than Friedlander, and I will mature out of this phase of hoarding books. I am wondering if he noticed the new shelf that has appeared in my daughter’s room of my favorite children’s books. My seven and a half month old daughter owns about 50 books. From Goodnight Moon to Madeline to Little House on the Prairie. And of course, I had to read these again upon purchase to “check them out” for my daughter. Yeah, sure sweetie, I’ll outgrow it…
If you don’t look at them anymore, what’s the point? People often express surprise that I can read a book more than once, but we aren’t talking about James Patterson or Breaking Dawn here people, we are talking about books that marked you, that made indelible impressions. Where do you keep your special books? Do they have an order, a system? Think about it for a minute. Now, imagine not having them.
So my answer to Mr. Friedlander is: give them away sir. But not just to a Goodwill, give them to a school library or a retirement center and give others a chance to live the joy you once had in these pages. Because if they are just collecting dust, you are starving them! They aren’t living up to their purpose! Don’t let your books waste away in the land of the forgotten and ignored.
I waited too long. It was an announcement that shook my little world on Sunday morning. 
