The title of this post sounds like it would refer to a list of reference books for evacuation in the event of a zombie apocalypse. That could be a useful thing too! But that’s not what this particular thing is.
This particular thing is a snapshot of my bookshelf. Photos of each section of shelf, accompanied by an inventory list. To me, from my perspective, it’s very pared down. Over the years I have owned thousands of books. But my downsizing impulses, together with time and tide, have prompted me over the years to pare my personal library down to a lean core.
The other day the protagonist in one of my fiction stories (a novel that I have been writing for a long time and am getting ready to share with you later this spring) was making a bug-out list. Her list of books that she would simply have to carry with her even if she had to evac alone on foot. Her list is almost the same as mine, go figure. Unfortunately we would both have to be very selective, because books are heavy.
I love my bookshelf not just for the truth and beauty in the books it contains, but also for its visual appeal. The arrangements of books and a few little knickknacks. If I bugged out, I would have to leave it behind. To floods or fires or fascists or whatever destructive force was driving us to bug out. The sadness of that prospect (even though it’s probably a scenario in my head that comes from reading too many TEOTWAWKI novels) motivated me to at least sort of give my bookshelf a little chance to make a difference by sharing it online.
That gave me the idea to make a little booklet depicting my library visually and as a list. A sort of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” kind of thing.
This is my indoor, personal library. Not the same as the Little Free Library that I have been stewarding in front of my home for almost 12 years now.
My library does not claim to be all-encompassing. Not even within the specialty fields represented. It doesn’t claim to have all the definitive tomes in each genre. Some of the books, like Skipping Christmas and Colgate’s Basic Sailing, were inherited rather than chosen by me. And yet they are every bit as much a reflection of what I’m about at the core.
(Weird that a person so prone to motion-sickness that she even gets seasick at the movies would have books on sailing, but the ocean is part of me and I love traveling it by armchair.)
There is a book, just one book, that I consider to be missing from this collection. I really need a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, because that would be one of the books that would go in my bug out bag for sure. (How foolish I was to give my old copy away. Always thinking I could find another that had the same familiar cover.) Another for sure would be the very slim volume of TS Eliot’s poems.
List of books, left to right top to bottom.
By the way, I once heard that a child who grows up in a “bookish” household with 80 books or more, is much more likely to develop a lifetime love of learning.
Sadly, many households don’t even have one book, let alone five or 10. When I was growing up, we had multiple rooms that contained densely packed bookcases. I can’t say for sure but I estimate the number of books at roughly 500 to 1000. And that was in a military household where we had to move every couple of years! My parents were absolutely passionate about education, and they believed we learned as much in our travels and extracurricular reading as we learned in school. What was great for my siblings and me is that our parents were always learning with us.
My parents were fairly strict, and exercise close control over the most aspects of our daily life. My father would unapologetically refer to our family as a “benevolent dictatorship” (with his characteristic warm laugh).
But one area where they were extremely permissive was in our exposure to ideas via reading. That should tell you something. I think they realized that there was no idea in a book that could harm us kids as much as remaining in ignorance. Even though there were certain subjects that I didn’t necessarily feel free to voice out loud, my freedom to pursue them via reading was unassailed. I can remember at eight or nine years old bringing home a stack of seven or more books from the public library, and novels for adult audiences were always included in my selection. Obviously no librarian at that time (late 1960s, early 70s) felt like I would be harmed by exposure to these topics. They probably figured that either I would completely not understand, or I was old enough to handle it. It pretty much turned out they were right either way. Bonus, I also learned how to look up more information when I didn’t understand something. This should really tell us something as well.
We shouldn’t be so afraid of exposure to unfamiliar ideas and experiences. Either as kids, or as adults. What’s really scary is when some topic becomes a “no-fly zone,” not able to be discussed.
Again, this inventory of my bookcase isn’t anything that claims to be definitive. I’m not saying what books you need to read. This is more like a fingerprint of myself. A book-fingerprint, if you will. That said, I do consider the sustainability-related section to be a fairly nice little core library for that subject area.
The pine cones, old spools of thread, Maine souvenir pillow (from Acadia National Park ca. 1977!), old familiar board games, and other objects are absolutely interwoven with the content of my beloved books. It’s like a thematic collage of the core of my life, or main strands of it, or something.
As for literature, I make no bones about it. I am completely enamored of early 20th century British literature. I have read and loved many books from all over the world and love them as well. But at my core, I’m crazy about Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, and a few select other old friends.
When I traveled to England in the 1980s, a couple years after graduating from college, I felt like all of the books I loved had come to life. Later in life, via the popularization of DNA testing, I would come to find out that I had a lot more English and Scottish ancestry than I ever suspected. So I guess it’s hardly a surprise that I would be drawn to England, Scotland, and Wales, and feel quite at home there, despite my sort of loud and not very British personality.
(I do also have Eastern European heritage which I strongly love and identify with. But for some reason have not yet learned Slovak or any other Eastern European language, or read all that many books from Eastern Europe, other than the obvious Russian literature we were assigned in school.)
As for how I reconcile my awareness of the ravages of settler colonialism with my unrelenting love of its mother tongue, English, let’s just say language is a deep thing.
By the way, in college, those of us who got into 20th century literature were teased by our peers. They called the genre “Suicide Lit.” I mean, for sure, the stories got into some terrain that could be depressing, let’s say. But, for me, the bringing of these themes out into the open was more like “anti-suicide lit.” Help you know you are not alone in the world lit. Give you instant deep companionship lit. (The fact that I would never get to meet those companions in person did not make them any less close to my heart.)
What I love about literature, and reading in general, is how it allows us to transmit human knowledge and experience across space and time. Such a high density of information at quite low bandwidth.
What I love about reading and language is that it really is for everyone. What I hate is when people try to set up little fiefdoms of gatekeeping and elitism. Which unfortunately is all too common in the academic field known as literature.
I’m not going to lie, I probably never once wrote a very good paper about a book. I never was much good at dissecting stories. Rather, I was — and AM — just ever-hungry to take in experiences from around the world and throughout time.
But, of course, long before the printed word existed, oral storytelling traditions accomplished this feat of transmitting knowledge and experience with even lower bandwidth — and obviously a much lower ecological footprint, since no printing or shipping (or electrons and servers) was involved.
Who knows what my role might have been in a culture where writing did not exist. I am not going to lie, my memory for detail has never been great, so I might just have been sitting in the audience. Then again, up to this point in my life, I have mainly been a consumer of writing rather than a producer of books, articles, and other publications.
The great thing about writing is that we can do it at any age. We’re never too old to start. Fiction or nonfiction, the field is always wide open. Everyone: Your readers are always waiting. (I am writing this as much to encourage and remind myself, as to encourage and remind you.)
I read about 80 or 100 books a year. I don’t try to; it just happens. Ends up being about half and half between books related to my field (permaculture design/sustainability); and fiction.
And now here is the list of my bookshelf. I may write some notes next to some of the titles. Hope you enjoy the list and my photos. And thank you for reading this far!
(Stay tuned. I’m going to be making the list as I get around to it. In the meantime, enjoy the photos! This is like a lifetime time capsule or fingerprint of a lot of what constitutes my core.)
