It's been a long day's night of a summer, working on a couple of projects which I'll tell you about in my next post, but today Kate Racculia is here! Kate is a wonderful writer whose new book, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, will be out next month. I can't wait! In the meantime read on to find out about her relationship with her books. Impossible not to relate! You've got me thinking about my shelves and their crazy "organization"....
Here's Kate...
Ah, books and their shelves...
My books and I, we
have a problem.
When I say “my
books” I mean, of course, the many, many volumes—primarily of fiction, but a
smattering of poetry, plays, and nonfiction—I have amassed over my lifetime.
The books of my childhood: The Westing
Game, The NeverEnding Story, anthologies
of Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. The books of my teen years—a
copy of Jurassic Park with SOON TO BE
A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE emblazed on a red starburst—and of college (Flannery
O’Connor, Shakespeare), graduate school (Who
Will Run the Frog Hospital, A Room of
One’s Own), and beyond, up through the past decade of my life as a
professional novelist. The problem my books and I have now isn’t so much that I
have too many of them (I do), or even that I have a problem getting rid of them
(I don’t, when I bother to weed), but that I possess enough now to comprehend
the flaws in my initial organizational system.
This
system, if you want to call it that, is a mishmash of circumstance and
affection, maintained by a mix of habit and laziness. Eternal favorites go
here. Current reads are here, and travel back and forth between living room and
bedroom. Books I was reading when I moved are shelved here, vintage mass market
paperbacks are stacked there. Books I’ve borrowed and intend to return but
admittedly probably never will are stashed there. Books that I can feel
exerting that special kind of gravity, that I’ll end up writing about someday,
even if I’m the only person who will ever be able to trace their influence—are
stacked, precariously, there. I am both a re-reader and a used bookstore
magpie, and go to my own shelves to revisit gems or discover un-read treasures.
The result is that my apartment, which is quite big enough for one person and
two cats, is full of not only overstuffed bookcases but random stalagmites of
books (from my vantage on the couch, I count five) that I admit are trending
less “cozy” and more “cluttered.”
But
now comes the problem: if I am, as Marie Kondo suggests, to pile all my books
into one room, sort through and only keep the ones that give me joy—where and
how on earth am I going to put the joy-givers back, and ever hope to find them again? I’ve Kondo-tidied other
parts of my life, my kitchen, my closet, so I know the delight and freedom that
comes from only surrounding yourself with objects intentionally chosen. And
humans better equipped than I have already come up with plenty of useful organizational
schema: Melville Dewey gets points for complexity. The alphabet—a classic. I
half attempted, several years ago, to make a bookshelf of favorite authors,
snuggling my Barbara Pyms up to my Stephen Kings, and plan to return to it
(probably around the same time that I read and return those borrowed books).
Bookshelves organized by spine color give me hives, though of course this is
essentially how my books are organized too: by a design entirely of my own
making, based on my recall both of the book’s physicality and when it came into
my life. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a
gift, is a TV movie tie-in with Jane Seymour on the cover—it’s in the mass market
stack. Beloved was a used book sale
score, missing its cover: a rough linen spine on the eternal favorites overflow
shelf. In order to organize my library in such a way that any human other than
me can find anything in it, I need to surrender the very particular ties I have
to each of my books as objects. I need to depersonalize it, in other words.
Which is probably why the idea feels so uncomfortable, and why I’ll get around
to re-organizing as soon as I return those books I’ve borrowed: they’re already
organized just so, as the library of my life.
Kate Racculia is a novelist living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the novels This Must Be the Place and Bellweather Rhapsody, winner of the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Her third novel, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019. She teaches online for Grub Street, works at her local public library, and sings in the oldest Bach choir in America.
Visit Kate at:
https://www.kateracculia.com/
Here's information about her latest novel:
https://www.kateracculia.com/tuesday-mooney-talks-to-ghosts
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