I have been surveying my personal library over the past few days as I write an essay about books and people and how the titles we choose can describe us in some way. I had already started on this when I read Jessa's article about William Gladstone's library - all 32,000 volumes of it! - and I wonder now after reading about how she "hides" some titles from guests, just what people would think of me 100 years from now if they had to judge me strictly by my books. Is there anything here that could give you an accurate portrait of who I am? I know that I'm in every book I own - that there are very clear reasons to me why these books are all here - but I don't know what someone could possibly think of me if this was all they had to go on. If I couldn't explain my library, I think it would only serve to confuse someone, or even worse, lead them to some quite wrong conclusions.
For example:
I have an entire section of books on New York City. I bought these over the years as I was doing family history with my grandmother. I got back to the 1860s on her father's side (still in NYC) and it started to get really complicated - The Irish are not well known for coming up with imaginative names and finding a specific John or Tom or Catherine in the midst of a zillion others is pretty tough. But we had a lot of fun doing it and I still work on it every now and then. The NY books were a way to better understand my grandmother's stories though, to better know just who she was. I've only been there once and that was back in the 1980s. I don't know enough about NY to love it, so thinking I'm a fan of the city based on these books would be a wrong conclusion indeed.
Hemingway biographies - I have three volumes of Michael Reynolds's Hemingway biography as well as several large coffee table type books on the author. But I only have one book by him - A Moveable Feast. Truth be told, I don't like his fiction writing all that much, I'm much more of a fan of his life. The way he lived, and insisted on living, absolutely fascinates me. He really was larger than life on every level, which wasn't necessarily a good thing for the women who loved him (he cheated on them all) or his children (one confused kid after another). But I find him irresistible somehow - it's almost a love/hate relationship. I wouldn't call him a literary hero, but he's something to me - I'm just not sure what.
The Canterbury Tales. It belonged to my father and is purely a sentimental book. I read some of the Tales in Brit Lit back in high school and universally hated them. I have no idea why these stories are still known. But when he got sick my father decided to read all the great books he never took the time to read before. Most of them he just checked out of the library but he actually bought this book and took it with him to the beach for weeks as he made his way through it (and my father was normally a wicked fast reader). I will never read this book, but I will never give it up either.
And there's so much more - horror and chicklit and hardboiled mystery. There's war fiction, war stories, war photos. There's gardening and cookbooks (laugh over that one if you know me at all!), there's sunken ships and aviation history. There's a book of saint's names and the thesaurus my grandmother gave me the Christmas I started college - and my dog Jake chewed most of the cover off of four years later. There are a lot of books that seem to make no sense, or can not be easily be explained. They say something, but I'm not sure what it is.
They say something about me, but I think I have to tell the story if I want you to understand. It's fascinating though isn't it - what books can potentially reveal about their owners? They don't seem like such a private thing but they are - in some ways they can be the most personal item you own.
They can be your whole world - your whole self and you don't even realize it. Until you think about it, you don't know just how much of your heart is sitting on a bookshelf.
