Alberto Manguel has an article up at the NYT on his 30,000 volume library. (I really must get his new book The Library at Night.) Here's a bit of the article:
My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious, all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.
Midori Snyder follows up on this a bit with some book memories of her own:
My mother once worked in the Rare Book Library of a big university library and I used to go there after school to visit her and some of the most amazing books stored in a climate controlled vault. There, I was allowed to open a first edition work of Issac's Newton's mathematical theories and see where Newton had written his own marginal notes and corrections. And then there were gorgeous life sized plates of Audubon's bird engravings, the incredibly unique "Little Magazine" collection of small press devoted to poetry (and where the four issues of my parents' magazine "Hip Pocket Poems" were also kept), and the gorgeous renaissance Venetian books with their paintings of the canals which became visible only when one fanned the pages of the book.
My own personal library is not that grand, but does include wall to wall bookshelves of about eight feet tall that my husband built when we moved into our current house a few years ago. I don't keep that many books - I'm determined not to keep them simply because I can but rather because I choose to hold on to specific titles. I don't know how many books we have now, but between the three of us (including the masses for my son) we likely have somewhere in the 1,500 range. Looking back at the list of books I was most looking forward to reading this year, I'm happy to report that several of them are titles that were much enjoyed and are now on my shelves:
Cherie Priest's Those Who Went Remain There Still was a dandy tale of "Appalachian folklore nasty monster craziness" that I will review in full in my October column and can not recommend enough if you like your horror smart. Cherie continues to be an author to watch.
Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else is the kind of mythic fiction that blends science, nature and history with hints of the impossible in such a skillful manner that you don't realize you are reading something of a speculative nature until you are deep within the story and wholly absorbed by it. It seems real - in the best possible way. (And bonus that this story feature Nikola Tesla!) Hunt is another author I adore.
My review of Jenny Davidson's The Explosionist will be up in my June column and this one is a real charmer - it's bloody brilliant actually and by far one of the smartest and wittiest YA novels I have read in ages (with a very real sense of menace). Jenny is off to a dazzling career, I promise and for the smart teen in your life this book is a must read.
I found Pierre Loti so interesting - and him so unlike any other person I have ever read about - that I ordered a copy of Lesley Blanch's autobiography as well. She was a wonderful writer and found so many interesting people to write about. I will report back later this summer on Journey Into Mind's Eye.
As to books I wanted to read but haven't gotten to yet, I have Sunrise Over Fallujah and Little Brother both on tap for my August feature on political books that teens will find interesting - they should be read shortly. I also still need to read Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler, and Jacqueline Winspear's latest Maisie Dobbs mystery. Dry Storeroom No 1 is due out later this summer and I'm really looking forward to that. And I'm positively longing to read Black Glasses Like Clark Kent by Terese Svboda but that might end up waiting until the Christmas list...we'll see.
New additions to the list are Samantha Power's latest, Chasing the Flame, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science by Renee Bergland, Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler (I'm reading her biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrad right now and love it) and also Ekaterina Sedia's Secret History of Moscow. Plus there's Theodora Goss's collection I picked up a couple of months ago (In the Forest of Forgetting) and Jeff Ford's The Shadow Year. I doubt I'll get to all of these by the end of the year but I'm working on them!
How is everyone else going with their Most Looking Forward To lists?
