My to-read pile is a nearly full bookcase, seven feet high. I bought the bookcase in San Francisco from a thrift store that existed in what used to be a big box store and soon became a Target, and carried it home, tied to my back. It towered over me, but I was pleased by how unwieldy it was to carry, how unlikely this gigantic thing, strapped to a woman who walked with a cane. It was already white, but chipped. The hard wood underneath showing through in places, so I repainted it when I got it home. Smooth wall paint, bought from a grungy housewares store on Valencia where the staff only spoke Spanish, junk mail on the floor underneath to protect the carpet from errant drips or stains. It's perfect. Taller and sturdier than anything similar I've found since.
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January 3: What are you reading right now?
Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know About People We Don't Know, by Malcolm Gladwell. Also some fiction. Junot Diaz next and Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life, by by Sir Ken Robinson PhD & Lou Aronica.
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The bookcase is mostly full of books I inherited from Silva, my godmother. She died in that San Francisco apartment, while under my care. Mine and Alex and her friends who had joined us, Caroline and Tiffany, who were in the room with her when she took her last breath. All of us asleep, exhausted by hospice. It was so large a loss, in the midst of so much else, so many other losses, the pandemic, my relationship, Alex in the hospital, needing to leave San Francisco for an unknown destination, I couldn't process it. I still haven't been able to touch that grief. There was a brief moment in the hall, as they were wheeling the body away, where I nearly cracked. The slightest sob crumpled from me, but then my poise snapped back. There was just so much work to be done. So much stuff to sort through. So many tasks. Endless tasks. And everything was in lockdown. If any of us had tried to examine the macro, we would have failed on the spot. I had no partner to suffer with, no one to carry me, no one to bond with. It was better that I felt nothing, that I stayed nothing, that my spark remained snuffed.
The vast majority of her books are gone. Given away, donated, mailed to her friends or left in little libraries. Boxes shipped to scholars of Juddaism. Boxes shipped to scholars of the occult. I tried to only keep the ones I thought I'd read or would make sense to sell. Rarities, first editions, old bell hooks. I sat in my living room, surrounded by literal piles of her things, putting books into boxes. One for me, one for the donation box. Two for me, five for the donation box. It took over a week. Only the former are on my giant shelf. They are sorted by topic, a bit. Biographies take up an entire shelf, though I couldn't name one I've ever read before, and women's studies, loosely defined, takes up another.
Silva admitted at one point, while close to dying, that many of the books that had come with her were not even hers, but her ex-wife's. She had told people to take precisely half all the books in the house they shared together, when they were packing her things during the divorce. A petty revenge, served cold.
The bookcase lives in my bedroom now, next to the bed, rather than next to the front door, which is where it lived in my last place. It was immediately stuffed full during unpacking. More than my weight in books, unloaded into the shelves. Each book hauled across a continent, and for what? Each one a possible afternoon, each one another avenue of ideas or story to walk down. Hardly any of them were something I would normally choose for myself. Instead, if I am lucky, reading these might be a way to know her better or perhaps spark something that wouldn't otherwise come to light.
In the year I've been here and capable of reading, I've only cleared one shelf. I pick them at random, waving my arm until it hits a book or scanning the shelf with blurry eyes until I happen to focus on a specific title. It's very scientific. The current book that I'm reading, Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss, has been an unexpected treasure. It is simple yet satisfying in the way that many things in life are simple yet satisfying.
it is almost bad news that I've found a book I like amongst the piles, rather than getting two chapters in and tossing it out*, as my rule is supposed to be No More Books Until I Clear Another Shelf. Yet here I am, finding relief in these pages and consequently, I find myself wanting to reach for further books. I've never had so many books on hand that I haven't read, so my brain might be refusing to see them as new. Or perhaps I've grown used to the titles I have, I suppose, even though I've never read them. Subsequently, this rule, though reasonable, may be doomed. #relatable
* read: donating to a local library