The bookcase is up. Burned my lentils while having to get it assembled in record time. I needed it to be up for the night, so that the books could get used to it and decide amongst themselves which would like to make the move. I believe in socialising books and making seating-arrangements to promote interrelationships; sometimes I give them what they ask for, sometimes I try to stretch them a bit by letting them make new acquaintances. I am not one to sort by colour, but this year I have put the boy and girl novelists on opposite sides of my larger case. And the girls are leaning against Proust, while the rest of the Frenchies are underneath the men. I wonder what any of this is trying to say to anyone. I don't think I'm exactly librarian material. (We ate fried eggs in the end.)
It took me all day to shift my books around. It would have been so nice to organise them according to language or subject, alphabetically in classical rows, but it's impossible. For one thing I have several shelves reserved for "ones to read". I can't integrate them yet, and "lose" them in the crowd. Then there are art books (general) and Anthroposophic interpretations of art which are better put with the Anthroposophical interpretations of the Gospels, Greek aesthetics and Grimm Fairy Tales; Kierkegaard has to share a shelf with history and Schama's Rembrandt rests next to a book on the diaspora (which I don't think he'll mind too much). Milton alongside this, though, is pushing my rhyme and reason. I ran out of space on the pre-modern English shelf. It didn't help much when I put my few American's on the bottom shelf of my new case.
In this case, Murakami ended up with a shelf all to himself, with plenty of room to spare, if we are into stacking. Don't have a lot of other Japanese authors (my mother has many and she gets very upset if I buy the same novel twice - not that she is very keen to lend her books to me. I usually don't return them, she says. Not true, I just take a very, very long time to be finished with them.
What a stupid piece of furniture, it suddenly felt ridiculous to be straining my back on words. I had just spent money I could have put towards a dog (getting one maybe/maybe not ever/soon for company after I leave Steemit?) on dead trees to store more dead trees. What on earth does anyone want to read a book for, anyway!?!
After four hours of moving piles of books around the room I no longer could hear my own mind, with its own indexing system. Who the heck was this crazy cow with all those dead trees in her house? I have another side-board with shelves instead of cupboards that is advertised as a quainte storage space for your odd belongings and for the rest a nice clean surface inviting a fruit bowl or a piggy-back plant (tolmiea menziesii)
There are some refreshing minimalist book shelf ideas here for people who go to the beach once a year and take along something to read. I wonder if I could challenge myself to find a "beach book" in my collection?
I sit down with a cup of cocoa and feel how sore my muscles are. A sedentary winter has been too abruptly broken by my my spring zest to tidy and organise home and garden. I even have an invisible thorn in the sole of my foot, buried deep in callous. I hobble along causing further malalignments. But then I suddenly feel how indispensible the weight of the book is to keeping your head on your shoulders - quite literally - attached to your limbs and that flexible, bouncy spine (ha! would that it were!).
Suddenly it feels like E-books are at the root of all moral corruption! You need the weight of print in your lap - variably so (not replaced by a single tablet). All that you read is dead weight: feel that! Turn over the page with muscle power and know that! Hear the dry paper. Watch the beginning getting buried by the middle to the end, when the cover will clasp all you now think you know back together. As your mind digests the content and does what it will with it, remain aware of the book as something outside yourself, an influence you must extract from carefully, slowly. There is nothing swipeable about a book.
Reanimated by the cocoa if not my whacky justification for why we buy to keep books at all, I spend another hour on the books, till I move on to the CDs..... No, don't get me started (opera next to gregorian chanting next to Occitan lays feels wrong, so we can't do "voice" in one drawer....)
