In a Home Full of Books
by Anna Luther
September 4, 2007 — Published in Accounts & Glimpses
They say if you really want to know a person, you can learn a lot about them from the books that they keep on their shelves. My bookcases boast titles as seemingly disparate as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and City of God. There are books on quilting, books on Gregorian chant, books on how to play the Irish flute, books on the history of the guitar in America. My shelves are home to Jane Austen and Terry Pratchett, The Rhetorical Tradition and The Zombie Survival Guide. There are books on how to be a musician and books on how to be a writer.
Even more revealing than which books people have in their lives, though, is how they interact with those books.
A bastion for books
There is something comforting in books, just in their physical presence. I can’t remember a time growing up that my family’s home wasn’t overflowing with them. We had at least one bookshelf in every room, and often more. The bedroom shelves were home to our personal collections; the kitchen shelves contained anything that wasn’t literary, from cookbooks to car repair manuals.
The living room was the real heart of our library. It enshrined first one, then two, and finally three five-tier bookcases, our own familial library. It welcomed me when I would wander out to scan the shelves to find something new to read, or something that had been read and merited a return visit.
Dinner and a discussion
Books never stayed on the shelves long — or out of our conversations. They often sparked debate at the dinner table.
Who was reading what? Oh, I finally picked up The Fellowship of the Ring!
How far have you gotten? Have you reached the part where . . . Shh! Don’t spoil it!
Has Paula started reading The Hobbit? No, of course not! C.S. Lewis was a better writer than Tolkien. Besides the whole premise just sounded odd. Weren’t Sauron and Saruman basically the same person?
No, not at all! Whatever.
Did you know that Dad stayed up all night reading Silas Marner? Really? It’s that good?
He apparently thinks so.
Current reading, opinions, and analyses flew from person to person, as we left our food to go cold and untouched in the heat of arguing some character flaw in Jane Eyre, some plot technique in Julius Caesar, or the inevitable discussion of why the characters in Sense and Sensibility seem to have nothing better to do than attend parties all the time.
Shared space and sentiment
It wasn’t uncommon to find us all settled in the living room with a book or two on Sunday afternoons, each of us reading something vastly different from another. Each of us would have a perch on some or other piece of furniture, contentedly musing away over an assigned reading for school, the current discovery from the library, or some early Church father’s dissertation.
Each reader engrossed in his or her own tome, silence reigned over the room until someone happened across a passage that begged to be shared. Usually, the interruption would be marked with a gasp or an exclamation of, “Hey, guess what just happened!” All present would look up half-grudgingly from their own work at hand, imagining that whatever it was, it wasn’t likely to be anywhere nearly as interesting as what they were just reading.
Mostly, though I remember the atmosphere of reading together: everyone was involved in his or her own book, but it was still a shared experience because we were sharing a space.
Personal present
Now I’m in my first apartment and am crafting my own library. I feel so much more settled in for having finally unpacked my books after relegating them to live in boxes in my closet for their first month and a half in the new place. I don’t think I have ever gone so long without having words surrounding me.
I had unpacked my multiple musical instruments, CDs, and stereo system, my spinning and knitting fibers, and my general requirements for daily life. Yet in the back of my mind, like their place in the back of my closet, my stowed books lurked. In spite of everything else that was unpacked, my room felt rather barren for its lack of books.
I had no shelves to put them on, so it seemed they were doomed to remain in the closet. I finally couldn’t take it anymore. Keeping those books in storage — present but ultimately inaccessible — was like keeping part of my soul in storage.
I gleefully sliced through the tape on the boxes, feeling a little like I was liberating prisoners unjustly jailed. Pile by pile, I stacked them against the walls, on top of speakers, under the bed. Small towers of words covered the available space from floor to window sill along one wall of my bedroom. I stepped back to admire my work. I had my books again.
Illustration by Anatole Upart.
Anna Luther
Anna Luther is an obsessive musician-writer whose days are split between pondering the finer points of Bach and flogging verbose writers.
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