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Bookworm, Pain Is Imminent (One of Two)

Monday January 17, 2005

I’ve spent much of the last two weeks, the first two weeks of 2005, really cleaning. Or arguing about cleaning. Because, you see, I’m living with my parents right now, and my mother and I vary widely on what the verb actually means.

I’ve been living with my mother’s definition—“move stuff around so that everything is in tidy piles in no one’s way” or thereabouts—since returning from Melbourne, but it was really starting to bug me. While any visitor to our home would justifiably be impressed by the utter lack of noticeable clutter, I was finding it impossible to actually find anything I needed in a reasonable timeframe. And since we’d decided to move my old Linux box into the closet and get rid of the rickety old desk that it’s been resting on in the opening days of the new year, I decided to just go all out and clean everything—both inside my room and out—in one go.

I do this to some degree every year. But I have it especially bad this time around—my grandmother muttered something last week about bottling my energy and my dad has taken to leaving whatever room I’m working in and not return only when I’ve decided to take a break. I overheard my mother tell one of her friends yesterday that I’ve “tackled absolutely everything” over the last fortnight. But the truth is, she was wrong: I didn’t work, didn’t start work, on the bookshelves until this afternoon.

And that was deliberate, I admit. Beyond this, only the newsreader’s inbox and the email queue remain (apologies to those waiting on replies)—and it was mostly this way because I was painfully aware of how much work it would require, and how much of that work I’d created for myself. When at home, I tend to indulge the impulse to read whenever and wherever it strikes; my books are all over my apartment, and probably my brother’s too, as a result. I spent what seems like hours gathering volumes from every corner, nook, and cranny.

I often complain that our two-bedroom is too small. After tramping around it multiple times carrying around heavy books, I’m starting to reconsider.

Finding everything was only part of the project, of course. Once all my proverbial lost sheep had returned to my room—overflowing stacks of prose and poetry on my nightstand and bed and atop my bureau—I had to re-shelve them all. More specifically, I had to re-shelve them wherever they would fit. I don’t have any other choice.

Sigh. The truth of the matter is, I like when things are in order; I wouldn’t have embarked on this mad project if I did. And it annoys me that I have to follow my mom’s lead with my beloved books and pay homage to the god of spatial skills—instead of the god of alphabetical order or the god of genre or the god of topical relevance, or at least the lesser god of linguistic solidarity so that my Spanish-language Neruda isn’t alongside my English-language Thomas Friedman—I simply don’t have the shelf-space to do otherwise; I was triple-stacking things years ago.

(As an aside—being a literary supplicant of the god of the spatial skills isn’t always a bad thing. He is remarkably lax about certain things, and I heard nary a peep—or thunderbolt—as I gave free rein to my whimsies and little ironies: The Poisonwood Bible is now neighbors with The Ideals and Realities of Islam; The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and Birthday Letters sit side by side; and my etiquette manual rests solidly against The Handmaid’s Tale. (Yes, I really do own an etiquette manual, and would never have gotten through my first funeral without having read through it.) Yes, I am awful and if Dante were writing his magnum opus today he would no doubt leave a special place for my irreverent smart-ass self.)

It was a very productive afternoon, considering I was dealing with months’ worth of mess, and I’m proud that I managed to get through so much in just a few hours. That said, I’m beginning to think triple-stacking isn’t going to work for much longer. I fear I’m drawing closer to the point that’s a nightmare for bookworms the world over: I’m almost entirely out of shelf space.

And when I say almost out, I do mean almost out. As in, there is scant room for books to go unless I know down a wall or two and take over the apartment next door by force. All the bookcases in our home, and I do mean all of them—the ones in both bedrooms, the ones in the living room, the space in the credenza, the racks above the computer desk, the shelves by the TV that used to hold VHS tapes and DVDs before the DVDs were moved inside the entertainment center to accommodate more books—are already double- or triple-stacked. And the ones that are double-stacked are only double-stacked because they aren’t deep enough to be triple-stacked. Hell, even a couple of chairs are currently holding stacks of books instead of being free to sit in.

True, one of these chairs is acting as a Lend/Lease/Reuse chair; its contents will disappear once I’ve lent, returned, or given away to the various people who’ve earmarked them. But only a small fraction of volumes are in this pile, and the vast majority of novels, anthologies, poetry collections, and biographies that I didn’t get through today actually belong to us, here. And, by the look of things, if they are not shelved right now, they may never be and left scattered about on coffee tables and desks instead.

Because frankly, it’s better to leave thick volume of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair on my desk and think to myself, “I could squeeze a couple of short books in that space on my bedroom bookshelf” than to occupy it and cede a little more to the realities of apartment life. It’s not going to work for very long, but it’s what I’m doing for now.

Yes, I need help—I know this. But I’d rather just have Fiore use her architectural skills and build me a really big library. I’m weak like that.

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