There are books to buy, and books to read. There are books to shelve by genre or by subject, rows of matching author names like tombstones in a family graveyard, biographies and autobiographies kissing in mutual admiration.
There are pet systems and pet hobbies for your taxonomy. Top shelf: The series your mother lent you to read when you have time, perched in plain sight so she will know you know you should start it soon. Below, Malcolm X stares at Barbara Ehrenreich. A children’s series leans haphazard against the annotated copy of the author’s first draft.
There are the shelves of paperback mysteries waiting for time to obscure their murderers again. A hardbound copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories migrates from its place next to Charles Dickens to sit stuffily next to Agatha Christie. Below, witty Austen presses cheeks against wild Bronte like boarding school friends tempting each other to mischief.
There is a particular joy in reorganizing a personal library, mixed with a particular guilt. There are more books coming in the mail. There are more books bought and unread than books I will ever read. So many are aspirational books – smart and dense literature, historical nonfiction, neuroscience. Those could be borrowed from the public library instead of purchased in a burst of fickle passion.
There is no better reading than slutty reading — indiscriminate vacation reading, the kind you do when you’re in a tourist town and find a shelf of abandoned airport best sellers in a motel lobby. I never would have read the biography of Michael Alig, the travels of Bill Bryson or anything by Maeve Binchy if it weren’t for the nil desperandum of having strangers choose my pleasure for me. Aspirational books can’t scratch that itch. I read for pleasure in the hour before sleep, and the pleasure is only heightened when I cheat on what I “should” be reading with mass market horror or a romance novel.
A nonfiction book about the 1918 flu pandemic sits on my nightstand, the bookmark waiting five chapters in. It is an excellent book. I bought it three months before the coronavirus pandemic, and picked it up because I felt I “should” two weeks ago. I have really enjoyed it so far. I’m not reading it. I’m reading a battered paperback I found tucked behind the Kierkegaard in my childhood bedroom. I should sell the Kierkegaard but I always think back to my Existentialism professor, and how I told him I would keep my books from the class to reread.
“Everyone says they’re going to reread Kierkegaard,” he said gloomily. “I don’t know one student who has.”
Someday I’ll defy him, but right now there’s Lord of the Far Island, a gothic mystery/romance novel I didn’t know I owned. It’s the tale of Ellen, a dark-haired, headstrong woman who’s invited by a mysterious benefactor to visit his island estate in remote Cornwall. It was written by Eleanor Hibbert under her penname Victoria Holt. Hibbert, born in 1906, wrote more than 200 books across three genres. She lived through the 1918 flu pandemic, World Wars I and II and countless other calamities before dying aboard a cruise ship in 1993 and being buried at sea. She knew how to live, she knew how to write, and she knew what people wanted.
My copy of Lord of the Far Island is an ugly duckling – missing a cover, dogeared with a mysterious pink stains. Someone has scrawled, “hope you enjoy the book” in loopy, childish handwriting on the back cover. Its bookmark is a page from a different desecrated book, a Western I believe. It should feel dirty to read this book, to prop it on the shelf next to last year’s New York Times bestsellers with their pristine dustjackets. Oh, but it feels so good. I can’t feel guilty today. Guilt is the habit of time’s petty dictators, for those who want to control a world that will always resist it. In times like these, each act of joy is an act of survival.