When the quarantine lockdowns began, I was giddy about the prospect of social distancing. Finally! I would have the time (and the excuse) to catch up on my “to read” pile. I would take work breaks in the middle of the afternoon that consisted of nothing more than stretching out in a recliner by our living room windows and opening up a good book. I read when I woke up and before I went to sleep. I read when I was bored (which was often), and I began to read multiple books at the same time: a different book for each of my different moods, and for the different times of day.
I read creative non-fiction in the morning, and literary fiction at mid-morning. I read historical fiction and non-fiction in the afternoon, and then at night I usually cozied up with some light (albeit gripping) fantasy or sci-fi. At one point, I was reading seven books at the same time. And I quickly realized that my “library” – which consisted mostly of books stored in boxes in several different attics – was not nearly accessible enough.
***
It’s a common enough trope for a writer to value their books above all other belongings. Even Perry Smith, one of the murderers from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, carried a box of books around with him as his only treasured possession. I’m no different in that I spent most of my adult life as a vagabond, drifting around and collecting new books, storing older ones in boxes in the attics of family and friends who didn’t seem to mind. I am incredibly different, however, in that I’ve never murdered anyone.
My boxing up of old books and gathering of new ones came in waves. I boxed up my childhood and teenaged collection before I left for college. This was a surprisingly large collection. I kept every book I read in high school, and I hoarded others: my older sister’s textbooks from her “Intro to Philosophy” course in college, and my younger sister’s “Hunger Games” trilogy; my brother’s copy of Blue Like Jazz and the endless flow of Pat Conroy books mailed to me by my great uncle. I added books whenever I could, and I remember one of my friends coming over and looking at my bookshelf in awe.
“You’ve read every one of these?” he said.
“Yes,” I lied.
Of course it was a lie. Even today, there are books from that shelf I still haven’t read (like “Cold Mountain” by Charles Frazier). But I knew, somehow, that one day in the distant future, a global pandemic would strike and make my hoarding of those books invaluable.
In college, I collected a whole ’nother set of books. Those went into boxes after I graduated and before I embarked on a year-long roadtrip to the four corners of the continental US. I took a few books with me – including Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, of course – but when I wasn’t driving, I was working odd jobs. And when I wasn’t working, I was out exploring, drinking, and “raising hell” (as much hell as an introvert can raise, that is).
This journey ended when I got accepted to a post-graduate creative writing programme in Glasgow, Scotland. Here I collected more books. So many books, in fact, that after three years I had to bring them home on separate flights, crammed amongst clothes and pillows in suitcases that were limited to 20 kilograms per bag. I flew my first load home in the spring of 2017, another that summer, and my final suitcase of books flew with me to Pensacola on September 23rd, three days before I would embark on a two-year-long sailing expedition to the bottom of the world.
***
I took a few books with me on our sailing trip. We had survival to think about, and space on the boat was usually reserved for emergency equipment, tools, food/water, or just standard gear that was required to fit and run a sailing vessel. I packed Ulysses by James Joyce, for instance (which I never read), The Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer (which I almost started to read twice, but then also didn’t read), and a handful of other titles, which I read over and over again (like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, A Hundred Years of Solitude, and Cry, the Beloved Country.)
Many of these didn’t make it home. The humidity peeled back plastic layers of book covers; mold ate at the paper; and when our boat went underwater (which was surprisingly frequent), entire books got drenched. In the South Pacific Ocean, there was rarely enough sun to dry them out. Pages that had been wet for weeks would mulch into pulp, and when they had finally dried out, they eroded to dust.
Most of these books I replaced. I simply couldn’t bear the thought of having failed them, having lost them from my collection forever. Even The Golden Bough, which had warped beyond repair, I replaced. It’s sitting on my shelf now. And after months of quarantine lockdown, I still haven’t read it.
But the quarantine has given me the opportunity to gather all of my library to one location, because for the first time in almost a decade I’m in a place, and at a point in my life, where I feel comfortable digging in. I’m married to an incredible woman, we live in a home, with our dog and a wide array of other things that add up to general domestication: most notably, a bookshelf on which to put my books.
Filling out this bookshelf became a vocation for me during the lockdown. I coordinated with family and friends, and arranged times when I could scour their attics for boxes of my books. Sometimes I found them, sometimes I did not. My books had been moved so many times, and over so many years, I didn’t even know where most of them were. I had to track them down through word of mouth, like a CDC agent contact-tracing COVID infections. Even now, there are books I am certain are somewhere, in a box in someone’s attic, that I haven’t been able to relocate (yet). But the books that I did find, well, there were far too many of them to house inside our home, even after building an accompaniment bookshelf (it’s only two shelves large, but it’s the perfect height for me to rest a lamp and my coffee mug on).
Most of the organization, then, had to do with prioritizing titles and replacing the torn, dilapidated cardboard of older book boxes with plastic storage containers, and placing those back into the attic. A few duplicate copies were spared and donated to our local thrift shop, and I was able to identify the books from my adolescent and young adult years that had gone unread. Those I placed in my “to read” pile. Many of which have since been read, but not all, since I can’t seem to stop buying books. (It’s a problem.)
We finished stocking our bookcase at the end of March, and then – in the middle of April – I added a different kind of book to my library. It is a book that feels dwarfed by the giants of my childhood, the vestiges of a decade abroad and years of travel: and yet, it is the product of all of these other books combined. It is my book, written by me over the course of seven years, and scheduled for publication this November. It’s a galley proof, so perhaps the final publication will feel more finished – more equal to the myth of publication – but the longer it sits on my shelf, the more it feels warranted. Like an adolescent, a book in its youth, growing up and developing among the folds of a vast and eccentric, extended family.
