Booked solid

I packed six boxes last night. On the top of each of them, in thick Black sharpie, I wrote BOOKS. I then turned and looked at my bookshelf and across my room. I hadn’t even made a dent in my books. When I moved from California, I knew most of my stuff would go into storage for an indeterminate amount of time, so I needed to be selective with the items I would take with me to mom and dad’s. In all honesty, I really wasn’t that particular about what I’d be bringing with me—save my books. They would not leave my side, much to the chagrin of the movers. (Couldn’t I pick something light?)

I’m currently reading Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman. I love it simply because it makes me feel better about myself. I am not alone in spending too much time contemplating book organization. Do you go alphabetical? (And if so, by what?) Chronological by era? Color scheme? And as I put book after book into box last night, I wondered if Fadiman had any insight on how to pack books. What's the best way? This is important! But as I dusted the horizontal ledges of a bookshelf someone made for me (also something that would not be rendered to the storage unit), I asked myself why? Why books? What’s the big deal?

Well, for me, books tell so much more than one story. There is the one, of course, told on the pages, but there’s also the one about me. Each book takes me back to an exact place, time, emotion, revealing a part of my life, a part of me.

I was in 8th grade, still living in Memphis, when I read Cold, Sassy Tree (Olive Ann Burns) and Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), books that made me realize I may be different. I liked words. Like, really liked them. Not everyone did. (How could anyone ONLY read Cliff's Notes?!) And then the books from my college trauma literature course, including Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. Oh how I love that creepy book (that I proved by writing an obscenely long paper on it). In that course, I think I came to realize the power that words hold, and don’t hold. How they can heal, and not heal. And it's also about the time I began getting the question "What are you going to do with an English major?"

I was reading Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) when my then-boyfriend and another couple vacationed to Lake Michigan. Sweating in a tank top and my underwear laying on an awful white, woolly couch in our second-floor apartment on Cleveland in the dead of summer wondering if I could somehow get any closer to the window fan, I read Richard Russo’s Empire Falls as slowly as possible because it just was so good. I didn’t want it to end. I think there may have been a few gin and tonics sipped too. And C.S. Lewis, who I read and scrutinized during a period in my life when I wasn’t sure there was a God and even if there was, I wasn’t sure I wanted Him in my life.

And book clubs! Seriously. In My Blood (John Sedgwick)? I can’t believe we had to read that. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. (Oh, R.O., this will forever crack me up!) Many of my books from my Cali book club hold sand between their pages from the glorious afternoons spent reading on the beach.

In Ex Libris, Fadiman talks about the “You are There” reading. Reading books in the places that they were written. This I did in Israel with Walking the Bible (Bruce Feiler). I was there. Feiler was there. Jesus was there. I recommend “You are There” reading!

My books also tell you who my friends are. A dear friend appropriately gave me David Sedaris’ Naked. Without this friend’s steadfast humor and smiles in my life, I assure you I would have many a frown-filled day. Most recently Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist from a friend whose quiet, easy understanding incites a peace in me that is hard to come by in this world, much like the words of that book did.

Point to a book of mine, and I’ll tell you the story within it and a story about it. And maybe that’s it...that’s why I carry them with me everywhere. They bring my friends who can’t come with me. And times that I didn’t want to end, but had to end. And emotions that I’d like to bottle up. Others I never want to feel again, but were life-changing and maturing nevertheless.

I’m looking forward to unpacking them in my new place. And even if everything else is still in boxes, once my books are out, I’m home.