The stacks referred to in the title of this column, as you may have guessed, are made up of books, to be found on all three levels of our tri-level house, not to mention the basement, a “library” unto itself. But the particular stacks I have in mind just now had accumulated over the years in a large room on the top level, which also includes our bedroom, one of the house’s two bathrooms, and two generously proportioned closets. Some of these books had been in their current position for more than twenty years; some had just been added to this or that pile in the last few weeks; many had been shifted, rearranged, added to or subtracted from the stacks over time.
Very recently, for reasons not germane to this column, it became necessary to clear some space, requiring the removal of a lot of books. Many of these, alas, I must part with permanently. I have been working on this, as circumstances have permitted, off and on for a couple of weeks, and I still have a way to go. It’s a dreary task, sometimes overwhelming: emotionally charged, physically exhausting, triggering self-reproach yet also giving great pleasure, pushing my memory into overdrive. It’s important to add that along with books, these stacks include miscellaneous church bulletins (going all the way back to the mid-1990s, when we moved to Wheaton, Illinois, from Pasadena, California, and began attending Faith Evangelical Covenant Church), letters and cards, back issues of bookish publications, photocopies of reviews and essays, and more, though not in any organized fashion.
The stacks began to form when we bought this house and moved into it in the summer of 1995, one year after we moved to Wheaton. Though there are certainly some recent books here, this particular “archive” strongly reflects the period from 1995 through 2016, when Books & Culture enjoyed its run. What to do with the substantial number of books on secularization, for instance? I’ve kept a few, but many more have been put in boxes or bags to go. Ditto many other subjects.
A lot of fiction has had to go too, as well as poetry and “literary criticism” (much more robust twenty years ago, say, despite “deconstruction” and other fads, than it is now). I have a hardback volume of Eudora Welty’s collected stories, so I can’t justify holding on any longer to paperback editions of this or that individual collection. Thinking about this prompts the reflection that it has been a long time since I read one of her stories in the big collection, reposing on a shelf in our front room. But I won’t part with that now!
I did, with regret, fill a couple of bags with novels by Alexander McCall Smith (a few of which my wife Wendy enjoyed as well, back in the day; we also listened together with relish to audiobook versions). We stopped following the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency sometime after the tenth book in the series; I read some of McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie books as well, before dropping out. It was harder to part with all the Henning Mankell books; as I was putting them in a bag, I thought of our daughter Anna (eldest of our four long-grown kids), who was also a Mankell fan and who interviewed him via phone for a piece that appeared in one of the street papers that flourished near the end of the Great Age of Print.
Some of the stacked books are gorgeous: Chatting with Henri Matisse, for instance. (“But will you ever actually open that book again?” a taunting inner voice asks.) Others are beat-up, such as an ex-library novel by Andre Norton, obviously checked out many times. (She was one of my early science fiction favorites, whom I discovered around the age of ten.) But get rid of it? No way! What about a massive, learned, heavily illustrated book on turtles? Send it to the grandkids in Connecticut? But would they want a doorstopper like this, or would they prefer digital resources? I temporize; I’ll hang on to it for now. And what to do with two short novels—The African Shore and Severina—by the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa, published in handsome paperback editions and commended by Roberto Bolaño? I haven’t yet read them. Regretfully, I put them in one of the bags to go out; I hope they will find a reader.
I imagine some younger readers shaking their heads with a mixture of pity and incomprehension. “This poor old guy.” Some would feel no pity; revulsion, rather, at the very thought of such stacks and stacks of books and papers and stuff. Maybe a few outliers would love to visit and browse.
