If you look at my blog regularly--or even occasionally--you have might have noticed what a complete random disaster our bookcases were. You can see this mess in the background in some pictures here and here and a million other places too, I'm sure.
There are three reasons why the mess on the bookshelves didn't bother me for so many months.
- The books were no longer in boxes. So the bookcases were a big improvement. Okay, so maybe the Bible was crammed behind Captain Underpants and the art books were stacked sideways with a 15-year-old road atlas of Britain and I couldn't find anything if my intellectual or spiritual health depended on it. (Wait. Or my physical health! David asked me the other week how you get out of quicksand and it took me half an hour to find the Survival Handbook. Thank goodness we weren't really sinking in quicksand.) BUT AT LEAST THE BOOKS WERE NO LONGER IN BOXES. (Which is where they sat for a long time.)
- Glass doors. I strongly recommend glass doors for your bookcases. You can shove all kinds of random reading material onto them every which way--and then you close the glass doors. And abracadabra! Suddenly your shelves are artfully disheveled--and look as though they could belong in Gary and Elaine's house. In case you were wondering, our bookshelves are from IKEA. They have held up quite well through two moves (always a concern for military families). This past move one of the knobs broke off, so we had to replace all of them. I'm not sure how many more moves they will survive--but that IKEA particle board is so much more affordable than the alternatives.
- I'll get to #3 later.
Last weekend I was struck with the overwhelming desire to rearrange furniture. (No matter how hard you try, you can never get it right the first time. Every time we move, I figure that if I am super thoughtful and take careful measurements, I CAN, I WILL get it right the first time. But it's impossible.) So Greg, wonderful Greg, got to remove all of the books before he moved and re-anchored the shelves. I figured the least I could do is return them to the shelves in a somewhat ordered fashion...
Ta-da!
People often comment to me on what you can learn about people from their books.
Hmmm, I wondered, what do people learn about us when they look at our bookcases?
First, there's the Norton anthologies. Ding! Ding! Ding! Dead giveaway: Undergraduate English major in the house!
That indicates that the books on the shelf are the English major's and will reveal more about her than her engineer husband. True, some of the books are Greg's (e.g. pretty much any fantasy minus Harry Potter sure isn't mine). But any books that reveal what Greg does with his mind are in his office, which is too bad because I think a hardbound copy of Disaster Response and Recovery would look quite lovely next to my Romantic poets anthology.
You might also notice the adult fiction to (non-reference) nonfiction ratio.
Looks like somebody values fiction way over nonfiction.
It's kind of unfortunate that the bookcase has so few nonfiction books because, these days, I rarely read fiction. And I guess a lot of the nonfiction I have read lately has been borrowed from friends, family, or the good old-fashioned library. So the bookcase does not reflect my current reading habits. It's a more accurate picture of what I was reading five to ten to fifteen years ago.
This here in the middle is what remains of my middle school class library.
Even though I only taught middle school for one year, I still thought of myself as a middle school teacher while I was teaching high school (for two and a half years)--and I obsessively collected books for my phantom middle school class. I had multiple copies of popular books, books that were trendy in the moment, and books that will always be classics. At its peak, my collection probably would have filled almost two of those bookcases. But over the years, I have gradually, steadily weeded it down. It was more than a little painful, but I deemed it necessary. It was hard to justify the amount of space the books took--many of them mediocre or so trendy that they were losing their relevance. I even gave away many of the very good ones--better to be in someone else's hands than trapped behind those glass doors. What I have left is a rather random assortment. Oh well. I have accepted that I am not going to have a middle school language arts classroom ever again: those measly three shelves of books are the proof of that acceptance. (I've gotten rid of the clothes and the library--if only I could bring myself to go through the boxes of lesson plans and teaching files in my basement.)
I have not, however, let go of the possibility of teaching writing again. Hence, the unusually large assortment of writing handbooks, grammar books, and convention reference manuals:
Okay, so our bookshelves tell you that you're in the home of a former English teacher. What else?
Oh, yes, we're Mormon. Can't escape that:
You never have too many Bibles, hymnals, or copies of the Book of Mormon.
Also, you might notice our travel books. Yes, we like to travel, be it to the flat water of Eastern Maryland or the islands of Greece--and we have been very lucky to have had opportunities to visit various places in our country and abroad.
I used to think hanging onto our travel books was kind of tacky. Guide books become outdated almost immediately--so even if we were to return somewhere, we wouldn't take our old guide book with us. So what was the point of keeping them?
The memories, duh!
I love our travel books. Sure, if we were ever to return to Egypt or Cyprus (which is probably going to happen NEVER), we would get our hands on the most recent guide books. But, for now, we love having them to pull off the shelf and remember where we've been. I'm terrible about labeling pictures, so they're a quick reference when we're in search of the name of that restaurant or state park or castle. And they have become kind of a travel history of our family. (I think the only major trip that's not represented on that shelf is our visit to Spain and Portugal. And that's because we simply showed up at the Dover Air Force Base passenger terminal with a big, fat Lonely Planet guide to all of Europe and told ourselves we would get on the first plane no matter where it was going. Well, the first plane was going to Spain. So we ripped out pages to Spain and Portugal and tossed the rest of the book--we were traveling light. And the Spain and Portugal pages eventually got tossed too, after our return. I wish I could see a nice squat Spain book on our shelf! Guess we'll have to go back.)
So that's a tour of my bookcase.
And now I'll get the number 3 of why I didn't mind the bookshelves being a horrendous mess for so long:
Because I didn't want to think about my books.
You see, the books are a more accurate representation of who I WAS than who I AM. It's kind of painful to remember to how much I loved studying literature, how much I used to love reading fiction, how much I loved my one little seventh grade class at Springville Middleschool, how much I loved challenging my mind in graduate school, how much I loved teaching that community college writing course, how much I loved traveling to "exotic" places.
But it wasn't as painful as I thought it was going to be. In fact, as I thoughtfully, even lovingly, placed each book on the shelf, I began to feel my soul fill with a quiet warmth. I liked remembering how I was. Even more, I liked remembering who I am. And who I was is a part of who I am.
The bookshelves may not tell the whole story. But they tell part of the story. A part of the story that I don't want to forget.
