What Books Are For

I built the bookshelves upon which my books stand, soldierly, at attention, spine out, though in places they break ranks in a jumbled stack. In my twenties I used boards laid across cinder blocks for bookshelves, and idea I plagiarized from my best friend Jim, who seemed on constant hailing frequency to all things chic. But cinder blocks are, well, cinder blocks, about as aesthetically pleasing as the drone of a vuvuzela. So, I replaced them with red bricks, and later replaced them with a variety of designer bricks. At some point I decided to build my bookshelves. Perhaps I was haunted by Willy Loman’s contemptuous comment to his sons that a man who doesn’t know how to use tools isn’t a man. Or maybe I decided that my books deserved a better display than boards laid across bricks—that I should give back to them in physical energy what they had given me in mental energy. The line of books on woodworking, power tools, fasteners, and do-it-yourself home improvement projects mark the evolution of that decision.

And that’s what books are for. To sit on shelves where they chronicle the stages of our interests, curiosities, knowledge, tastes, and dreams. Which is to say, us.

On my shelves sit all seven of the books in the Chronicles of Narnia series, in order of publication, beginning with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle. I read them to my son and looking at them reminds me of my childrearing years. Standing alone on a bottom shelf is the missal I used in elementary school, the facing pages in Latin and English, to remind me of the Catholicism into which I was born and educated, and which I so fervently practiced until, for reasons I still cannot explain, I joined the ranks of the fallen away. I see my mother’s copy of Gone with the Wind, which reminds me of her and of the cruel Alzheimer’s Disease that took her from me before it took her from me.

I see almost book written by Stephen King, a better writer than many are willing to acknowledge. Surely his dismissive self-characterization as “the McDonald’s of writers” was a playful irony. My avidity for King used to be an embarrassment, considering that I teach English for a living and am therefore supposed to read only literary literature. But they remind me that I long ago forsook such pretention for books that propel me along with an interesting story and characters whom I care about. That’s why I also have most of John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and all of Sherman Alexie.

The queue of books by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau remind me of my college years in the 1960s. They prompted my shift from a business major, where my heart wasn’t, to English, where I found my heart. I recall that Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” struck me as the most radical piece of writing I had ever read, and it fostered my participation in an anti-war sit in where I was roughly handled by a policeman.

My bookshelves house a series of books on theology; philosophy; the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Billy Collins, and Kay Ryan; the complete plays of William Shakespeare and August Wilson; mass media, with recent additions of both Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky; evolution; neuroscience, all of Carl Sagan and Steven Pinker’s popularizations; even a sizable collection of that most self-absorbed without being self-examining type of writing: literary theory.

The books on my bookshelves bear witness that I have not been pushed and jostled out of my own life, that, to paraphrase Martin Buber, my “I” and my “me” can still hold a conversation.

That’s what books are for. They are to be put shelves where they can act, to use an inelegant phrase, as memory retention devices, where they recount our personal history’s embodiment, our felt experience. Where they can, finally, ineluctably, bring us back to ourselves.