An Embarrassment of Riches

Rod Clark, managing editor for Rosebud Magazine once wrote,
“Some of us pick up books the way dogs pick up burrs, or a
sweater collects lint.” As the buyer for a bookstore, I don’t
pick up books, they pick up me. Thanks to dubious advances in
printing technology, virtually every book published by a major
publisher appears in an advanced reading copy first and, thanks
to unchanged mailing list technology, nearly every one of them
finds its way to me. Advance reading copies are stacked
against my desk at work like sandbags against an illiterate
world. I feel like the gatekeeper for the Ellis Island of
bookselling, deciding who will go and who will stay.


The books I can’t shake sneak home with me where they may
sit for weeks before I rediscover them. Then they are new all
over, a happy surprise pile of books that spoke to me at work
and would like to have a private word at home. Freed from
sandbagging duties, they now lounge around—on the coffee
table, the floor underneath my overloaded bedside stand, and,
most especially, around my desk at home. If my desk at work
is like an immigration office, my desk at home is like a cocktail
party for books, where they mix and regroup according to
interests, as people do. Some I’ve read and keep close like the
old friends they are, others, I aspire to know but may never get
past shuffling them from pile to pile around our home office.
You can tell if I’ve had the chance to read a book because its
pages are freckled with spaghetti sauce.


There are currently four towers of books balanced on the top of
the shelves next to my desk at home. The two shelves below are
stuffed with more, not really the “B list,” there is simply no room
to store them properly—upright and spine out—and there hasn’t
been for years. There is no room anywhere in our house to store
books properly. Doctor’s children are purported to receive the
poorest health care; a bookseller’s books fight spine-twisting
battles to remain intact. Since my desk at home is in a room with
windows on three sides, the books about birds and trees are
closest to me. There is an ancient copy of Trees of North
America; All the Birds of North America; What’s That Bird?
(for my 9-year-old son); The American Horticultural Society
Plants for Every Season, and three armchair gems: Teaching
the Trees: Lessons form the Forest; How to be a (Bad)
Birdwatcher; and In the Company of Crows and Ravens. For
some reason, my British edition of Nell, the autobiography
of Irish feminist activist Nell McCafferty (and Nuala
O’Faolain’s former partner of 15 years) tops the stack.
Perhaps she grew weary of the chatter in the next pile.


Said pile is currently topped by an advance copy of Alison
Clement’s psychological gem of a second novel, Twenty
Questions. Below it is another novel, A Seahorse Year,
former “Voice Literary Supplement” editor Stacy
D’Erasmo’s award-winning second novel about a San
Francisco family’s turning point year. Ron Power’s
authoritative biography, Mark Twain, follows. I worked the
booktable at Powers’ appearance here. I loved an eery new
novel, Finn, inspired by what we know of Huckleberry’s
father. I am re-reading Tom Sawyer. I even gave a
BookSense recommendation to an earlier Twain biography,
but I have yet to read this one. Nor have I read the copy of
Mockingbird sitting below it. I wanted to read this
biography of Harper Lee after seeing the movie In Cold
Blood, but I felt I should first read In Cold Blood (which I
did), and reread To Kill a Mockingbird (which I haven’t). I
have read James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice
Sheldon which sits below Mockingbird. This stack also has
two young adult novels by the award-winning writer
Jacqueline Woodson, whose sensibilities for her craft are
spot on. I am haphazardly collecting her books.


Among the gems in the rest of the bookcase are Cynthia
Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World; Alice Munro’s
Hateship, Courtship, Friendship, Loveship, Marriage;
Salmon Rushdie’s Fury; Jeannette Winterson’s
Lighthousekeeping; The United States of Wal Mart; The
Chicago Manual of Style; Roget’s Thesaurus; and the
cookbook I made in fifth grade for my Girl Scout cooking
badge.


Tom Sawyer and Plato’s Republic, which I am reading
“at” are in the living room. In the bedroom I have a box
of first novels I’m supposed to read as a member of the
finalist committee for the Lambda Literary Awards.


I love my literary friends and always imagine I’ll be
having long meaningful conversations with them, not
unlike the quality time I always intend to have with my
son. More often, I grab those moments and read in fits and
starts, like sneaking chocolate from a secret stash.
Sometimes, I think, “why do we even have all these
books?” and I start sorting them to sell or giveaway. The
other day, I realized the milk crate in our office at home
was just such a box. I had been moving it around the room
for three months without realizing it was my designated
get-rid-of-them box. As I hoisted it for what I determined
would be the last time, I noticed a couple of mysteries by
Dashiell Hammett among them. “Was I out of my mind?!”
I thought. I extracted the Hammett , put them on the shelf
by my desk, and put the rest back with their sisters and
brothers in the basement for safe-keeping.