Finders, Keepers
When is it time to give books away?
Our house is full of books. There’s at least one bookcase in every room except the bathrooms, but they’re relatively organized, and we can usually find the book we’re looking for. The question is, do we really need all of these books? By my count this weekend, we have about 1,600 of them.
The question arises for me because I spent a good part of my summer weekends helping my parents move into a smaller apartment at their retirement community, and though they had already downsized twice since leaving the house we grew up in, my brother and I were astonished by how much stuff they still had. Including a lot of books. I couldn’t help thinking about purging some of my own stuff before the moving boxes come for me again.
Books ought to be easy to get rid of. You’ve either read them, or you haven’t. Maybe there are a selective few that you think you might actually read again, but for the most part, if you’ve already read them, why keep them? I know people who give away every book they own once it’s read. I kind of admire that discipline and the lack of clutter that results.
In our house, there are hundreds of books we haven’t read yet. In addition, because we are a household with two English teachers, we probably have more books than normal that we might not only read again but also refer to or teach from. But honestly, that doesn’t explain it all. We could probably condense that collection, if we had to think it through, into the single tall, oak bookcase built into our living room—a piece of furniture that clued us in that this house was meant to be ours when we first saw it.
You all will probably understand when I say that the rest of the hundreds and hundreds of books in this house that are here for absolutely no practical reason are here because we just like having them around. But why?
It’s not really because they’re part of the décor. They’re not particularly beautiful. In fact, many of them are beat-up paperbacks that just aren’t visually appealing. We don’t have a bookshelf that’s been curated and color-coded for visual pleasure. I wonder every time I see someone post a photo of bookshelves like that: How will you ever find the book you want? I suppose if you know your own books intimately, this system might work. But more likely, people who color-code their bookshelves or intersperse art among their books have a more refined visual sensibility than we do. I would love to have a prettier house, but my books aren’t going to make that happen.
We also aren’t keeping all of those books to impress anybody—not even ourselves. Bookshelves—and the particular books on them—may accomplish that purpose for other people. Everyone is well familiar by now with the talking heads on the evening news and the curated bookshelves behind them. (You wouldn’t go on national television without curating your bookshelf, would you?) I Googled “bookshelves as a Zoom background,” and the first result was an article titled “Top 20+ Bookshelf Zoom Backgrounds to Make You Look Smart.” I’m humbled to report that the history, art, and science sections of our bookshelves are puny in comparison to fiction, from Medieval to yesterday. We have a lot of kids’ and young adult books, too. This is unlikely to make any guest to our home think we’re some kind of geniuses. Incidentally, I did curate one bookshelf—the one behind my YouTube videos, which includes copies of my own novel and the colorful spines of The Best American Short Stories collections dating back to the ’90s.
None of this explains why all these books I’ve already read and probably will never open again are still in my house.
In her paper “Book Love: A cultural sociological interpretation of the attachment to books,” the University of Edinburgh sociologist María Angélica Thumala Olave theorizes, in part, that
people are attached to books because books are icons: they embody and enable the realisation of sacred cultural goods. Books do not simply communicate or signal social values or ideas. Aesthetic immersion in books’ materiality allows for these values to be realised.
This makes a lot of sense to me. A physical book carries both the literal and the figurative weight of what’s included between its covers. Still, as I consider this question about my books, I think there’s another explanation: Books make me feel at home.
I grew up in a house full of books. My parents were readers who also read to my brothers and me, which gave us a distinct educational advantage. Smithsonian magazine, in 2018, reported on a study that found that
growing up with few books in the home resulted in below average literacy levels. Being surrounded by 80 books boosted the levels to average, and literacy continued to improve until libraries reached about 350 books, at which point the literacy rates leveled off.
The same study compared
adults who grew up with hardly any books in the home, but went on to obtain a university degree in comparison to an adult who grew up with a large home library, but only had nine years of schooling. The study found that both of their literacy levels were roughly average. “So, literacy-wise, bookish adolescence makes up for a good deal of educational advantage,” the study authors write.
None of that is really surprising. But I also think that growing up in a house full of books taught me something simpler: that “home” means, in part, books. When I imagine myself living in a house without shelves full of books, it seems sterile to me. Books are part of who I am.
There have been times when my books have started to crowd me. A favorite children’s book that I used to read to my kids was The Library, by Sarah Stewart, with illustrations by David Small, in which books take over a woman’s house. Dusty piles of books have, at times, taken over my homes, too, and when they start cascading from the shelves, I usually get to work in order to pass some along and contain the rest.
When is it time to give books away? For me, it’s only when I run out of room.
At which point, some might say I just need another bookshelf.
My rule of thumb is that I only keep books that I would / have read again. No one else in my house follows that so we have children's books in every room and boxes of classics in the attic from when we moved in eight years ago.
After watching your excellent Middlemarch video, I was happy to see the one about Goodreads. Even though I am a Goodreads author, I have never really understood how the site works. This is the first explanation that has made sense to me, so thank you! Although I like my Goodreads Author Page, I made it in 2021 when my first book, Letters to Men of Letters, was published. In my new book, Letters to Men and Women of Letters, I am excited to have fulfilled my dream of writing to the female authors, many of whom are still alive, who have marked me. I especially love your comments that “‘home’ means, in part, books.…” These are what drive my teaching and writing.