This exactly captures my feeling about the value of a personal library (and a bit of my apprehension toward the time that's surely coming when I'll have to disperse it). When students tell me they don't read, I quote Mark Twain at them: the person who does not read possesses no advantage over one who cannot.
Self-inflicted illiteracy makes such a needless waste of a mind.
To walk past the bookcases in our family's house is to make a different study of the history of time.
...When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.
By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too — the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read "A Brief History of Time" on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of "The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America," the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country. To walk past our bookcases is to make a different study of the history of time.
So when the schoolbooks came home from Haywood's classroom, all we could do was build more bookcases and shoehorn them into his home office. They are likely to be the last bookshelves we will ever build. There is no room in this house for more, and the next house will be smaller. Too small for all these books. Almost certainly too small for sentimentality in any form.
In the meantime, our books ensure that I am still surrounded by all the selves I have ever been, and all the selves my mate has been, and the selves our children were when we held them in our laps and read aloud from the poetry collection I gave my husband when our oldest son was on the way. In that book are some of the same poems my father read aloud to me as a child.
Just as she did then, just as she did again when our sons were young and again whenever anyone opens that book now, Emily Dickinson is right there explaining how a book is a chariot "That bears the human soul."
However capacious her own inimitable soul, Emily Dickinson could not have conceived of a book that exists in paperback, much less as an mp3 or digital download. Even recognizing them as books, I will always have trouble warming to such forms myself. I prefer the messy shelves, the dogeared pages, the notes inscribed in a familiar hand. Someday, long from now, a child may open a book of poems and find the note I wrote to her grandfather on the flyleaf: "For Haywood, to read aloud (beginning in about nine months)." Maybe she will save it, too.
Margaret Renkl, nyt
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My Bookshelf, Myself
...When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.
By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too — the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read "A Brief History of Time" on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of "The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America," the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country. To walk past our bookcases is to make a different study of the history of time.
So when the schoolbooks came home from Haywood's classroom, all we could do was build more bookcases and shoehorn them into his home office. They are likely to be the last bookshelves we will ever build. There is no room in this house for more, and the next house will be smaller. Too small for all these books. Almost certainly too small for sentimentality in any form.
In the meantime, our books ensure that I am still surrounded by all the selves I have ever been, and all the selves my mate has been, and the selves our children were when we held them in our laps and read aloud from the poetry collection I gave my husband when our oldest son was on the way. In that book are some of the same poems my father read aloud to me as a child.
Just as she did then, just as she did again when our sons were young and again whenever anyone opens that book now, Emily Dickinson is right there explaining how a book is a chariot "That bears the human soul."
However capacious her own inimitable soul, Emily Dickinson could not have conceived of a book that exists in paperback, much less as an mp3 or digital download. Even recognizing them as books, I will always have trouble warming to such forms myself. I prefer the messy shelves, the dogeared pages, the notes inscribed in a familiar hand. Someday, long from now, a child may open a book of poems and find the note I wrote to her grandfather on the flyleaf: "For Haywood, to read aloud (beginning in about nine months)." Maybe she will save it, too.
Margaret Renkl, nyt
Charles Darwin (
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