Turning a page

Last week I bid farewell to 33 of my books, and the trauma lingers.

Here’s the scenario.

I own 848 books. (I just counted them.) I have a living room bookcase for fiction and poetry; shelves in our guest room for books about sports, travel, and San Francisco; and, lining a wall in the study, built-in bookshelves that hold the rest of my nonfiction collection.

Against another wall in the study is a freestanding bookcase that holds the 109 books I haven’t yet read.

Except for those unopened few, I’ve read every book on my shelves. Cover to cover. Even the Bible, including “the begats.” I don’t believe in displaying books that I haven’t read because in my opinion that would be dishonest showboating.

But let me also come clean about something.

Ever since I moved into my own San Francisco apartment 45 years ago, I’ve meticulously set out on display every one of my books because, in my imagination, all of my visitors – friends, colleagues, prospective love interests – would come through my door and gaze in wonder at the hundreds of books in my library. These visitors would then check out all the titles, appraise my varied interests, come to a deep understanding of who I am as a person, and marvel at what a well-rounded intellectual I am.

There are, however, two problems with this:

1. I’m not an intellectual.
2. No one, in 45 years, has ever done this. No one at all has shown one iota of interest in what books I’ve read. Not in my Inner Sunset studio, not in my Lower Pacific Heights flat, not in my Richmond District apartment, not in my Sunset District rental house, and not in my current home. Not once.

(By the way, as proof that I’m not an intellectual, the next book on my reading list is Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards.)

***

My parents taught me to read when I was three years old. (Although that’s commonplace now, it was virtually unheard of when I was a child, back in the Pleistocene Epoch.) My kindergarten teacher would often plop me in a big chair à la Edith Ann and ask me to read to the class if she needed to leave the room. In those days, children learned to read at school in the first grade, so my initial few weeks as a first-grader were extremely taxing for me. I’d come home crying because I was given assignments like coloring a piece of paper that had only a big “B” on it. Yeeks, I was bored out of my skull. So everyone decided that I’d skip ahead and immediately slide right into second grade. I had a few problems at first, especially because as a November baby I was already young to begin with. During my first few days as a newcomer in that class I earned my first “F” from our very mean, Germanic, old, big-boned, buxom despot of a teacher, Mrs. Haller. She scrawled on my paper that I “didn’t know how to follow directions.” Well, for cryin’ out loud, I was only five!

But I ended up okay. I was more immature and naïve than my classmates throughout my school years, but I fell in with the right crowd and held my own, for the most part.

Meanwhile, my love for reading never waned – through the Golden Books period, the Scholastic Book Club era, the Junior Classics epoch, and on into adulthood.

***

A few years ago, as my collection was growing and I began to insist on strewing more bookcases around the house, Julie suggested that she move her desk out of our study and hire someone to line that wall with bookshelves. Although she never said it, I think she was panicking that we have very little room in our small house, that my bookcases would take over and create a very unpleasing aesthetic, and that this was an emergency situation. So, in a desperate move, she gave up her half of the study. I now have beautiful mahogany floor-to-ceiling bookshelves complete with lights.

(These are not, by the way, staged books stacked alongside vintage vases and bronze lamps – a trend called “bookshelf wealth,” according to a recent New York Times article. I’m looking at the shelves now and all I can see are books, an old radio, a jar of coins, a broken Thunderbird model, and my grandfather’s 8mm movie cameras.)

Julie, meanwhile, now does all of her computer work while slouched on our living room sofa. She still believes that she got the better end of the deal and that it was all worth it.

***

Although I am really, truly, desperately trying to stop acquiring so many new books, I recently started to panic when I realized that my “unread” shelves were packed in so tightly that soon there would be no room to handle any new additions. So I boxed up the 33 unread books that I deemed expendable and drove to Potrero Hill last week to donate them to the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. I chose volumes that I’ve carried with me from place to place throughout my life even though I’ve always known full well I would never read them. They included torn, ancient works about Victorian manners and a huge collection of mediocre Reader’s Digest poetry.

Nevertheless, I had a sense of unease about it, hoping I’d have no regrets. After all, those books will have left me behind silently, without ever uttering a word.

***

I still can’t part with any of the books I’ve already finished. It may be silly, but I feel that they are pieces of me. They’re the chapters of my life: 1930s children’s books handed down by my father; cheap, well-worn volumes I carried home like treasures from used bookstores near college; Beat Generation literature I gobbled up in City Lights bookstore, just before I decided to move to San Francisco; works that moved me to visit places I’d never been, try food I’d never tried, listen to music I’d never heard; and books I’ve read on beaches or on trains, or while drinking coffee and eating sunflower seeds on foggy Sunday mornings.

I’ve kept a list since 1973 of every book I’ve read. Flipping through those lists re-creates, for me, the stages of my life, the changes, the evolution.

(Or devolution, as the case may be. As I mentioned, my next book will be Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards.)

Why else am I reluctant to get rid of books? I guess I’m loath to toss out the work of artists who labored over their writing. It’s agony, sometimes, to write. How could I so cavalierly disrespect an author?

Or maybe it’s something entirely different. Maybe I’m thinking about “someday.”

Someday I’ll be bedridden with a terrible disease and will have nothing to do but read my unopened 109 books. So obviously I must keep them! Of course, in my diseased and weakened state, there’s no way I’ll be able to lift my multiple 4-pound (I weighed them) Autobiography of Mark Twain volumes, or even balance them on my withered chest. But keep them I will, because what if I have a sudden hankering to pore over one of Twain’s letters?

Then, when I’ve run though all those unread volumes but am still confined to bed, I may want to re-read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. You never know.

***

So what happens next? Even now that I’ve relinquished my 33 volumes, I don’t have enough space on my shelves because I continue to discover – and then buy – new books. It’s an addiction I can’t quit!

People also will continue to gift me books, which I welcome because I love surprises – especially ones that contradict my innate tendency to make immediate, unreasonable judgments. My friend Julie R. gave me The Warmth of Other Suns a few years ago, and I was dismayed. I dreaded having to read it. I didn’t know what it was about, but I did know that it was a 640-page nonfiction work penned by an academic. GROAN! I threw a massive internal fit. Well, it turns out that the book follows three families during the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South during the last century. It’s beautiful, riveting, nerve-racking, powerful, emotional, and all-around intoxicating. I mean, an absolute page-turner! One of my all-time favorite books, despite my lunatic misgivings.

I will say that I’m starting to download books occasionally on my Kindle now, even though for years I swore I’d never commit such blasphemy. I limit those purchases to works that I think wouldn’t impress my nonexistent imaginary visitor who has absolutely no interest in my bookshelves.

I suppose I could also just go to the library and check out books. I do, after all, have a library card. We have a small branch library just 6 lovely, walkable blocks away, and I’ve been in there only once or twice. A travesty. Okay, a visit to that place is now on my nonexistent list of New Year’s resolutions.

COMMENTERS, PLEASE NOTE: WordPress is no longer supporting my particular page type and doesn’t seem to be asking commenters for their names, so everyone is identified as “Anonymous.” If you’re commenting (which I love!), please leave your name if you’d like me to know who you are!

***

Due to popular demand, I am including, at the end of each blog post, the latest random diary entries that I’ve been posting on Facebook for “Throwback Thursday.” These are all taken absolutely verbatim from the lengthy diaries I kept between 1970 and 1987.

May 13, 1975 [age 19]:

“I can’t breathe. It has gone from cold, rainy days to sweltering hot 90-degree weather in a couple of days and I simply can’t breathe. My nose is totally plugged from hay fever. I’m sore from head to toe from softball yesterday. I’m a physical wreck, as usual. It isn’t even the things I was born with that are bothering me today, like my long nose and fat legs. No, it’s the fact that I don’t really know enough to wear makeup or cut my hair or wear feminine clothes. I took one good look at myself in the mirror this evening and could’ve killed myself right there on the spot.”

May 15, 1975 [age 19]:

“Yesterday our country bombed three Cambodian boats in retaliation for their seizure of our merchant marine vessel – it was the right move to make after all but it scared the living daylights out of me. Just the day before, [my friend] Joe got official notice from the army that his classification had been changed from a ‘holding’ status to 1-A and that he should go down to fill out papers or something. And when I thought of the possibilities of more war, and the fact that Joe could go, all young and innocent and in love with the Moody Blues and sportscars, and be shot up by some man he never even met – I could never shoot Joe! But then at night we rescued our Americans and the Cambodian army gave up and we’re out of danger. I never want to go through another war – never see [my friends] Ted or Joe or Morris or [my brother] Marc die for nothing.”

May 19, 1975 [age 19]:

“Today is my half-birthday. I never really believed that I’d live this long. But I’ve got so very much living to do – ‘all that hitchhikin’, all that railroadin’, all that comin’ back to America’ (Kerouac). I should also think about falling in love, too, but I’ve been busy.”

May 23, 1975 [age 19]:

“When [at work] we were told that due to cutbacks we might not all be hired again next year, I tore my hair and decided to really have a good time at the Chicago/Beach Boys [‘Day on the Green’] concert tomorrow. We’re going to go in Frank’s van. So all afternoon and night I whizzed around, paid my fees at State, got my [allergy] shot, ate my free coupon’s worth of Bumbleberry Pie in Eastridge, and bought a boda bag and a bottle of wine and a small bottle of Tequila Sunrise. Then Ted and Joe and I drove to Togo’s to buy sandwiches, planning to go miniature golfing afterwards. After we’d waited in line they ran out of bread, so we cursed and walked to a corner store which by luck made sandwiches. We made the poor guy make 16 sandwiches.”

May 24, 1975 [age 19]:

“Day on the Green: Chicago/Beach Boys/Bob Seger/Commander Cody/New Riders of the Purple Sage. It was SCORCHING – everyone was out in their bathing suits or bare chests and even in my traditional jeans and t-shirt I got sunburned. Joe and Ted and Frank and I were always clapping and moving and standing up. Of course, we’d been taking glubs out of our boda bags and we love music anyway and the Beach Boys were so astoundingly good in person that they stole the show. [Name omitted] gave Joe and me about 9 joints. One of them was supposed to be Acapulco Gold, the good stuff, but it must not have been from Acapulco because after smoking two I was still waiting for whatever it is that’s supposed to happen. I wanted to be down on the lawn instead of in the stands. Where we were sitting, there weren’t very many enthusiasts, except for a small group of teenyboppers. At one point Bruce even fell asleep with his head bent forward! That was incomprehensible to me! By the way, I’m writing this on Sunday, and I was paranoid all morning that I’d smell like pot at Church.”

June 14, 1975 [age 19]:

“This summer I’m going to spend revamping my entire body.”

June 19, 1975 [age 19]:

“I spent hours getting my [very long] hair cut off yesterday. I really like it short because one, it’s a change, and two, it’s easy to wash, and three, it’s a big heavy load off my head, and four, if I go to the beach now I won’t have to worry about how to wear it in the water. My major worry is my inability when it comes to rolling it up. I hate it when I allow my petty apprehensions to control myself so much. But I got an awful lot of compliments today and it made me happy. It’s like a weight has been lifted off of me. I ran downstairs and told Mom and Dad, ‘You know, my introversion and everything, now I think it was all because of my HAIR! Something oppressive’s been removed. I’m ecstatic!’ Well, the exaggeration is apparent, but it’s partly true and I feel free now. This morning I bounced into [my allergist’s] office carefree as blazes. It was gray and cloudy, windy and drizzly, but my spirits soared (and I bought a new pen!).”

June 23, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’m so excited! I called [my East Coast friend] Jeanne today and we made plans for me to go visit her in July for about a month! I will fly into Washington rather than South Carolina; doing that, we could travel wildly up the coast towards Maine, where we’ll meet [her husband] Steve and then buzz back down to S.C. to folic at the beach. Before then, I have a list of frantic preparations to do, including working on my car and learning how to wash clothes, roll my hair, and dance.”

July 18, 1975 [age 19]:

“I’ve bought a movie camera! I really need to document my trip to the East Coast this summer, when I’m sure I’ll be sitting in a bar in New York drinking tequila. I decided on the Bolex 350, which I bought at San Jose Camera. You can even take indoor pictures without movie lights! It was a very big decision, made with trembling hand and voice.”