Book Selves, Part 1

“The personal library is often in a sense the embodiment of the spirit of its collector and owner. It certainly is a striking manifestation of his tastes, habits, character and pursuits.” –Noah Porter

Someone, and I can’t remember who, once said that books are the furniture of the mind. To some extent, this is true. Indeed, whenever my life begins to change in big ways, two things happen: I dream of being in houses—moving, renovating, discovering hidden rooms—and I rearrange my books. Medieval history gives way to poetry, which bows out in favor of theology. Self-help drifts away to be replaced by small collections of essays: Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, Akiko Busch’s The Geography of Home, Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder, some Emerson, Stevenson, and Ruskin. Books on business squeeze together to make room for books on Victorian home life over here and World War II over there. Suddenly, piled up in front of biographies, I have a stack of books loosely concerning ethics that I don’t even know what to do with: Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Elliott Dorff’s The Way into Tikkun Olam: Repairing the World. A few weeks ago, my roommate asked, “How do you keep in your head what’s in all of these books?” I told her it’s the other way around. The books are annexes of my brain, a kind of offsite long-term memory storage.

Or perhaps “brain” is the wrong word here. As Noah Porter, once the president of Yale, wrote, “the growth of a library when it is unconstrained by hindrances or influences from without, is a record and memorial of the growth and changes of the owner’s intellect and tastes, and perhaps of sudden or gradual transformations in his aims and principles” (363). Of course, our aims and principles never grow only in the fertile but dry soil of intellect. Passion is the motivating principle, whether it is a passionate curiosity about how we came to live the way we do now, or a passionate disgust that so many millions died brutal deaths sixty-five years ago, or a passionate yearning to begin to make the world a better place, starting right here where I live and eat and read.

Half the time, I don’t even realize a change has happened in my life until I see how much change has happened on my shelves. So in that sense, the books are mirrors, reflecting me back to myself. In them, I see my dreams. I discovered this for the first time in fifth grade when I read The Hobbit. Listening to the dwarves singing, “the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic…. Then something… woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick” (Tolkien 28). Almost thirty years later, I have seen such sights in Vermont and Switzerland and Japan. I know, more or less, how to use three different kinds of swords, although they abide in my closet with the laundry rather than on my belt. But when I read those words now, I still feel the sudden chill of recognition. I am again, the child I was at eleven, yearning for adventures, while at the same time I am the forty-year-old woman, remembering adventures I’ve had.

Time is irrelevant to memory, and so also to books. I read Shogun now and instantly I am a high school freshman at my summer job, reading it for the first time in the dimness of Sunshine Preschool during naptime; I am the twenty-two-year old, standing jetlagged in the Ginza district of Tokyo at night, surrounded by neon signs above and tulips below; I am the middle-aged woman reading the thick, battered paperback in front of me while eating noodles from a bowl I bought in Japan two decades before. These selves can never leave me. Books bring them back where I can see them, and momentarily be them, again.

Strangers and even friends reading my shelves can never know the portfolio of selves my soul holds. It’s one thing to say, “Show me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are,” but that telling can never be a complete description because the person cannot also tell, as I can, who I have been, and so the “who you are” is woefully incomplete.

We change. Old selves drift to the back of consciousness, never wholly lost, always ready to be called back by a familiar phrase or scent. For booklovers, our shelves reflect these changes, showing the outer world what is currently true about us. As Lauren Winner writes, “I have learned by now that the first sign of my waning passion for something is losing interest in the books. It’s like being about to break up with someone. The first thing that happens when I lose interest in some man is that my libido lapses into a coma... I’d rather have him stuck over in the corner by the desk than anywhere near my bed” (283). As with our old books and loves, so with our old selves. Sometimes it’s just easier to put them away, move them down to a lower shelf of consciousness, or box them up out of sight. But they are never gone.


Porter, Noah. Books and Reading. New York: Scribner’s, 1888.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. New York: Ballantine, 1973.
Winner, Lauren F. Girl Meets God. New York: Shaw, 2001.