Where Our Books Live #2

This is a picture of the bookshelves in our family’s bonus room. 

See how neatly arranged they are?  My husband, who is phenomenally tidy, took it upon himself a few years ago to tame my riotous book collection and bought this book shelf in an attempt to corral some of the more unruly volumes.  He worked happily at this for a few hours; artfully arranging the books by height, width, and overall aesthetic composition, which explains why Women Who Run With the Wolves is shelved with The Doll People and Book Lust.

When he was finished, he turned to me and asked, “Have you actually read all of these books?” 
I’d love to report that I had some witty reply, like “Some of them twice…”, but in reality, I probably muttered a vague, non-committal response. 

Unsatisfied with my reply, he followed up with, “Well, if you’ve already read them, why do you keep them?”  At which point, my head exploded.

I am not the first writer to be plagued by this seemingly innocent question.  In his excellent book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about the age-old question of how (and if) we use the books we live with.  I’ll share this excerpt:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

Umberto Eco and I are in the esteemed company of countless other writers who have been asked this same misguided question.  Okay, so I realize that this is pretty much the only thing that Umberto Eco and I have in common, but a girl can dream, can’t she?

In the July 1865 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson describes a similar, albeit hypothetical, conversation between a graduate student and a carpenter whom he’d hired to build (what else) bookshelves for his expanding library.  You can read the full essay, Books Unread here, or you can enjoy this excerpt:

Sooner or later, every nook and corner will be filled with books, every window will be more or less darkened, and added shelves must be devised. He may find it hard to achieve just the arrangement he wants, but he will find it hardest of all to meet squarely that inevitable inquiry of the puzzled carpenter, as he looks about him, "Have you really read all these books?" The expected answer is, "To be sure, how can you doubt it?" Yet if you asked him in turn, "Have you actually used every tool in your tool-chest?" you would very likely be told, "Not one half as yet, at least this season; I have the others by me, to use as I need them." Now if this reply can be fairly made in a simple, well-defined, distinctly limited occupation like that of a joiner, how much more inevitable it is in a pursuit which covers the whole range of thought and all the facts in the universe. The library is the author's tool-chest. He must at least learn, as he grows older, to take what he wants and to leave the rest.

All right, all right: enough of the nerdy quotes.  In tomorrow’s post I’ll talk about what this means for raising a reader.