One Man's Mindfest is Another's Mindfester
All right, I admit it, I'm a booksnob. Books that are beloved of my husband are disdained by me. By no means all of them, since he is by his very nature an omniverous reader, but his very special reading treats are comprised of innumerable detective and mystery books, by countless writers, some talented, others mediocre. He consumes these novels by the bushel. Really - he does. He haunts used book shops, and thrift shops for others' discards, coming away pleased with his bargains, but best of all his freshly-anticipated reading material. Some make the grade, some do not, but each gets its due as a published work, deserving of a reader.Needless to say there are classics which he retains, and far more that cannot be described as anything but remotely adequate in plot, language and writerly skills, which are destined to be discarded, much as their previous owners discarded them. Trouble is, there's a bit of a kink in there. Although he has given away bagsful of such books to people who declare they have similar reading interests to his own, he has always refused to box up the hundreds and hundreds of others which haven't made the grade and donate them to thrift shops from whence many of them came in the first place.
Why? Simply because he dreads the prospect of not recognizing a promising new crime or detective novel as one he's alread read; re-purchasing it and hauling it back home only to discover partway through his reading that he knows all about the plot, thick or thin. So the books have been, willy-nilly hoarded. They hang there, insolent and defiant from our book shelves, announcing their vulgar presence with cheerful glee. They gloat their sloppy presence, defying order and gravity, let alone gravitas.
They have become the bane of my existence in my feverish attempts to continually work some order into the anarchy of our bookshelves. They bring back memory of the time some several decades earlier when my husband would feverishly read lists of government library publications which had been deemed to be no longer of use and were destined for dumping. Employees were permitted to indicate an interest in possession of the periodicals, journals, magazines, novels, academic publications, and take them. And he did, he really did, carting home box after box of these valuable publications which, once shoved into a corner of our-then basement family room would never be looked at again.
It was like having an incurable disease, this desire to collect books of any and all types in the hopes that they would one day prove their worth, add to the collector's store of knowledge, pique his interest in the rare and the arcane. What this did, eventually, was make it nigh impossible for me to get into corners of this large room without stumbling over still-unpacked boxes of periodicals and books cluttering up the place, steadily gaining a fuzz of dust and making me utterly miserable. That was then. This is now. We have another house.
This house boasts a library on the second floor (we had no need at that point of more than three bedrooms), and many bookshelves in addition in a study, and a much larger room in the basement of the house - all groaning under the weight of these treasures. I did my best to urge order within our cluttered world. But the realization finally dawned that these books were emerging victorious, gaining the upper hand, leaving me bug-eyed with the effort of restraining them.
Came the grim ultimatum: It's them or me. Was that pause to consider really necessary?
Grudgingly, after appeals ranging from the depths of despair to the heights of anger, admission of responsibility emerged and we devised a diabolical agenda of dispossession, a method whereby we could safely dispose of all those jaunty jackets which delighted in taunting me. He would place a discreet "X" in black marker on the spine of all the books destined for disposal. Then box them and head out to our local Salvation Army Thrift Shop.
Oh happy day.
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, September 06, 2006
<< Home