Tag Archives: books

Should We Be Tossing Out All Our Books?

A neighbor of mine, a funny guy who used to be in some punk band that people were all crazy about twenty years ago, but who is confounded by the aura of celebrity around mention of said band in his presence, is moving to LA this week or next. He has been offloading a lot of his belongings.

I spent the last month visiting my storage unit and downsizing it to save some money in the upcoming months, as the introductory rate was about to go up to the price of a week’s worth of groceries, give or take, so I went over to assess his earthly possessions out of a sense of perhaps misplaced camaraderie. I found similar piles to those that had been stacked in my own storage space way out near Point Pinole, where my friend’s husband says they keep the bodies, and realized I was not alone in my chagrin as of late regarding earthly possessions. Regardless, I left with a number of his CDs, including one of said punk band, because it was a good freaking band.


It seems the biggest problem I have is my collection of books, which has morphed or shrunken over the years, depending on space constraints. As I’ve stated in the past, I have an addiction. An addiction which I’ve curbed slightly due to recently watching my relatives cart a couple of trailer loads full of books from my grandfather’s house after he passed away.

Not only did they fill trailers, his closets were stuffed with books. There were books under his bed. There were books in the cupboards. He likely read most of the books he collected in his last years, and some of the collection were probably very valuable, but the sheer volume of books collected and retained in those spaces overwhelmed the handful of cousins, aunts and uncles responsible for sorting through them after the fact, and thus all were rendered fit for the El Cerrito Recycling Center, where they were offloaded and promptly scooped up by art dealers lurking in the shadows.

Because I grew up with little money and not many material belongings aside from the essentials (clothes, bedding, some CD’s and books within reason, usually purchased through sporadically earned allowance), once I got my first full-time job I got busy collecting everything I had been deprived of in my youth. I bought clothes, shoes, books galore, and CDs. I bought sheets and towels and random paraphernalia. I bought all the music my parents had forbade me from listening to growing up. I bought a buncha crap I sure didn’t need.

Then, after four years in one place, my husband and I started moving every year or two. Each time we moved, we left a ton of stuff behind, stuff that had seemed relevant but in retrospect merely collected dust. And we schlepped. A lot. Of Crap.

When I recently moved to my new room in an Oakland Victorian, I had a mattress someone had given me, my guitars, and the bare essential clothes I needed (three pairs of black pants, a handful of black tank tops, a black hoodie, some cardigans, socks and underwear). I didn’t have any books, just my journal. I had a little black table and the old black Mac laptop my friend gave me.

It was awesome, having so little. Nothing to worry about cleaning. Easy to find where stuff was. Less laundry to wash.

My things remained in storage for about a month and a half. After living amongst my grandparents old things back in 2008 for a few years, I was kind of over stuff. A lot of my things and almost everything they had left behind had been ruined by the black mold that had been growing in the walls of their house and when I’d left there, I’d dumped about half or more of what my husband and I had owned out of necessity.

Fast forward to recently, and the idea of owning less has been developing for years, yet here I was, still hoarding an entire storage unit worth of stuff. Having to save money by paring down made me really go through what I possessed with a fine toothed comb. As I started parsing through my belongings and bringing one car load at a time back to my new room, it started to get crowded. There were boxes of clothes I hadn’t even missed, and which now don’t even fit. But the thrifty tightwad in me kept saying, “What if you need them?”

I ended up donating a lot to Goodwill workers who had to pry what I was handing to them from my clutched fingers. “Thanks for thinking of us,” they said, as I ran away lest I yank those items back out of their truck.  I donated an old stereo with the working CD but broken tape player, a fan, a $200 Guess fake fur white coat, a pleather Goth looking coat, a dish rack, bags of clothes. I recycled old papers.

I filled three bags and two boxes with books I knew I’d likely never read but had paid good money for and brought them to the library where I work, in order to donate them, holding back a bag of second thoughts I couldn’t quite let go of which are now sitting by my desk.

But tell me, do I really need “The Martha Rules”? (In my defense, my aunt gave it to me. Sentiment is a killer.)

Yet…staring at me in my new bedroom is a wall full of books.

They don’t all fit on the one small bookshelf I have. They’re stacked willy nilly, on top of the bookshelf, two deeps on the shelves, to the side of the bookshelf. But I don’t want to let any of them go. They are stressing me out. I’ve read two articles on how to reduce books: Letting Go of Paper and Books and Breaking the Sentimental Attachment to Books. (A third article talks about getting trade-in credit. I just don’t have the energy to go schlep my stuff so someone can pick over it and tell me they’re not worth a cent…although that $200 jacket gets me a bit teary eyed when I think about it.) I can’t seem to further par them down, though I bet you a million bucks I haven’t read three fourths of them, and likely won’t in this lifetime.

I work in a library for crying out loud. I can check out most books. But there’s this apocalyptic side of me that worries libraries won’t house books forever, that those of us that held on to books will someday again have valuable possessions. Pictures of book burnings come to mind. We trust the libraries to keep the books, but libraries are weeding and paring down every single day, I know this, because I do so myself. We are replacing more and more books with computers. The librarian at the high school down the street says her principal cut the budget down to one third what it used to be, because, “Soon we won’t even have books anyways. Everyone will use tablets.”

The idea of having all of my books on a computer or a nook makes me want to cry. I love books. I’ve schlepped these books around for years because books are a solid item worth keeping. Books are the most perfect item. Electronic “books” can be lost or damaged in a heartbeat. Books can withstand dust, soot, water damage, tears and food.

One of the articles mentioned recycling old journals. I have an entire bookshelf of journals from age 11 up. I’m 31 now. I am not recycling my old journals. That thought makes the writer in me want to scream. All those words, all those memories, recycled? My whole life, which only exists in words and memories outside of my quickly aging body which will inevitably be eaten by worms, recycled?

***

My neighbor, as he was boxing up his art books, said, “I’m afraid to let these go. I haven’t touched them in four years, but what if I am doing an art project and I need to reference Van Gogh or something?”

He paused. “But then I tell myself that the desire will pass and I’ll forget about wishing I had that book. I just want to throw this all out and start from scratch even though I know I’ll get to LA and go, ‘Crap, why didn’t I keep the colander?’”

***

I don’t want my friends and/or family to have to go through my stuff and get rid of it all when I croak, except maybe the journals, which I would want to have from my parents/relatives if they ever passed away. But the books, I’ve got to let them go. Maybe I can have a free book party and donate the books to my friends. Maybe I can just donate them all to the libraries nonprofit organization to sell.

I don’t know. I love books.

But, that being said, I don’t want to carry them around anymore, and I don’t want them packing all available spaces. Frankly, I don’t want to look at them. AND the dust in those fine pages is making my allergies flare up.

Will books be valuable in the future? Will they not? It’s anyone’s guess. I don’t know if I want to take the risk of no one being keeper of the books. The thought makes me sad and symbolizes the final brick and mortar in a society that is becoming entirely dependent on technology. Fickle, unpredictable technology. Finite resources. Alas, but books are made of paper, which is also a finite resource. We can’t win. Everything is screwed. Keep the books! Run!

Enough Books to Boggle the Mind

Today, I am going to talk about books, and the abundance of books I see working at the library.

As many of you know, I am a freelance writer, creative writer and a musician, but I also work at a county library part-time, because ever since 2008, having one job is simply not enough.

In spite of what the news is telling us about how much better it all is, things are still tough for many.

At the library, I am usually attempting to research teen books or teen programming ideas, or am helping people research homework, books and information at the reference desk. Or, often, I’m helping people do something like log in to a public computer or open an internet explorer browser, because libraries are a huge resource for people without internet access.

Sometimes, though, we get short staffed, and I help with checking in books that patrons from other libraries have requested.

I love doing the router. When I go out in what we call “the stacks” (or what people used to call the stacks) to pull requested books off the shelves, I stumble across books I never would have found on my own.

I always wondered about farting dogs and what adventures they might have. No. No. No.

Which is why I usually end up with 20 – 30 books checked out at any given time. A habit I am trying hard to curb, because as soon as you forget to return one book, the fines add up. And yes, county library employees do also have to pay fines. Yep.

Books and books and books and books. And more books.

Sometimes, when I am checking in books, I look at the book jackets, doing “research” for something we called readers advisory. The funnest part of my job is suggesting favorite books to other people. Or used to be the funnest, before I realized how varied people’s tastes are in general. What I like, they may not like. Regardless, I learn a lot from reading book jackets.

First, there are a lot of books out there that I am simply not interested in. Romance, westerns, most mainstream formulaic mystery. I get to see the latest literature, teen books, children’s books, magazines. Often, the books that intrigue me the most are memoirs and non-fiction books.

Looking at the bios of many of these authors, I realize that a wide, wide variety of people write books. And there are a plethora of subjects to write books about.

A plethora you say?

And often, I think about my own writing and what kind of book I want to have published (memoir, certainly, or collection of witty essays a la Anne Lamott, my hero). And then I wonder why I can’t be holding a book of mine someone has requested.  Then I remind myself that this is because I haven’t yet finished writing said book. And then I don’t have anything else to say to myself, so I read more book jackets and author blurbs on back covers.

When I worked in a publishing company, I sometimes wrote the blurbs for our books. This was for women’s themed books and travel books. I was never required to read the book before I wrote copy for the book jacket. It was mostly a synopsis my coworkers gave me, or that I garnered from the press release. This is pretty standard. Often, the book jacket is written by someone who didn’t even read the book (argue this if you are the exception, publishing employees!). So if you use the book jacket to ascertain what you will find inside of a book, often, you may be missing out on a good book.

On top of that, it’s hard to choose which books to read these days. Often, because there are so many, it’s trial and error. There are so many books out there. Sometimes, with all the editor pitching I have to do for my freelance work, which also involves reading magazines and assessing the proper markets for my pitch, I am already overwhelmed with daily text and ideas. Then, when all of these books cross my path, I start having more ideas, and sometimes, I simply get overwhelmed, and start to ponder if having this much information always at our hands is helpful for civilization.

I was reading an article on the KQED website, Mindshift, the other day, called Doomed or Lucky: Predicting the Future of the Internet Generation. Many old school professors are discouraged, thinking these kids are going to be ADD monsters because they can’t sit still. Some scientists are positive that they will only be different, perhaps better, that future generations will be able to move seamlessly from work to home life, via streaming technology, that they will adapt well.

And I also stumbled across a manifesto Seth Godin wrote on the entire school system in general, how it was originally created because child labor laws prevented companies from using child labor, and so school was set up to create good factory workers, but since our current society is changing, because production and factory jobs are not so much the future, maybe we need to rethink the school system structure. Kids sitting passively for eight hours while a teacher lectures is not the future of education, if we’re smart. (His book, Stop Stealing Dreams, is free here.)

I think I’m straddling the middle of technology taking over. I grew up without so much of the computer life, but then in my teens, computers started becoming more the norm. And slowly, it has crept in. When I got back from a year of school in Jamaica, after years of being a vagabond on and off, I remember being put off by the sight of my parents and little sister constantly staring at computer screens. My mom wanted to gift me a laptop for my 18th birthday and I freaked out, told her to get me dishes, something more practical. I wanted to be fit, outside, writing by hand, not glued to a screen.

Shows how much I knew. Now I’m glued to a screen most of the time. As are many other people.

But books, let me steer this conversation back. Books–whether ebooks or paper books, I don’t care–are still here. They are still thriving. People are so doomsday right now about books, they come in and tell me that the future of books is horror, empty shelves, etc. I do not agree! Have you read some of the statistics on books lately? (google “books not dead” or “the future of books”) Books are abundant, whether in physical book form or ebook form, and people still buy them. And they certainly check them out from the library.

There are so many ideas out there. So many books. So many people writing books. The good news is, that gives us writers a chance of success, especially in the non-fiction market, depending on what your expertise is.

The bad news is, sometimes you simply wonder, do we really need a new book on this thing? Really? Do teens really need another fantasy book? Do adults really need another meditation book with Buddhist undertones? I’m not saying these things are bad, it’s simply overwhelming the amount of everything we have right now.

There is no hope of me reading them all in this lifetime, as I’ve learned from talking with our elderly patrons. One person was talking to me recently about trying to read Faulkner. She was probably about 80. “It’s so hard to get through it! I need a dictionary for so many of the words. But I want to be able to tell people, yes, I read Faulkner, if only one book.”

Good luck with that, I told her. I’ve got stacks and stacks of books on my own shelves I haven’t read. And here I am checking out more books all of the time, scanning and skimming them daily. It’s enough to make the mind explode!

The First Books that Inspired Me

I was thinking today, about one of the first books that ever inspired me. The first, in my teens, was Catcher in the Rye. The dude just made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world.

I still have my teacher’s copy from High School English. Apparently I wrote a story for that class as well, as I have a vivid memory of a girl coming up to me and saying “I loved your story, I could totally relate.” I wish I remembered my story. Or kept it. The good news is that even then, in the darkest days of high school, I still wrote stories and turned what I wrote in.

Then, of course, Go Ask Alice, set me off on my next journey, though the United States and beyond, sampling the big and little pills to make me smaller or taller, depending.

After that, I got quite entranced by The Anne Rice Vampire Novels, read them all so much I could probably read them now, years later, and know them word for word. She created a world, and a history, and creatures so beautiful I could not imagine, so I had to try. Followed by the Witching Hour series. New Orleans, just how she had captured it when I finally saw it with my own eyes and couldn’t help but think that maybe Lestat was waiting around the corner for me.

I’ve always had a hard time separating fiction from reality.

Then of course, there was the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, and The Elecric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Thom Wolfe, and all of the Tom Robbins books up to around Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. They just boggled my mind. The things I didn’t think I could even think about thinking I knew, and the insanity, the hilarity of it all.

Now, these aren’t great literary books, they’re not your Snowcrash or Neuromancer, but I love those as well. Altered Carbon, even.

Absolute favorite book I was ever assigned to read was 1984. At 17, I had a feeling, though 84′ had passed, the books prescience would eventually come to be true, and has. We live in a world of double-speak.

And oh for the many many books I’ve read in between, from cheesy Janet Evanovich bounty hunter novels to Zombie Trilogies and Vampire love stories…

All of them serve their various purposes.

Chuck Palahniuk blew my mind when I read Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke, and Lullaby and up until Diary, he did it to me every time.

I still haven’t read Fight Club- I’m waiting until I’ve forgotten the movie, because the movie I hear, is pretty dead on. But still, that was his first.

Who else out there will blow my mind? This is a challenge, but I may have to pick up some books from my shelf. The Stranger, by Camus or the Handmaiden’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

House of Leaves, The Contortionist, Dermaphoria - all amazing books I read this year.
My Secret Life, by Donna Tart, one of my all time favorites.

And I can’t forget Brave New Girl by Louisa Luna. Or Crummy. Or Requiem for a Dream and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.

And the fun ones. The Emotional Idiot. Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves.

They’re gathering dust now, but I’ve plucked one from my collection, one of the many I haven’t read, and it’s reeling me in. Into another life. Some other writer’s fictional world.

What will I find herein? I must turn the page…

Stephanie Plum, Lingering Thursdays, Books and a Schizo Red dog

Today is a long meandering day. Thursdays linger so long. It’s so strange how time can stop while you’re at work and then just chug on like a barreling train when you’re not.

Just trying to find some stability in this new world I’ve created. Some routines, traditions, relaxations.

Lately, books call to me. Books, books and more books. Fitting, since I’m interning at a book-publishing company filled with the types of books I like to read & write. Books I’d like to read and write but am not reading and writing.

My life instead has fallen into the hands of Mystery novel writer Janet Evanovich. My life waits on hold as I count the minutes until I can go pick up a copy of To the Nines, the next book in her hilarious rote series about Stephanie Plum, a completely incompetent bounty hunter, wooed at times by two separate men, one of which she loves, one of which she lusts after…endlessly…story after story, and of course, each book ends with a teaser to reel you into the next book. But they all start with enough info that you can pick up any book in the series and be clued in, or you can read them in order, which I prefer.

Of course, being a bestseller, it follows certain uniformities, but I can deal with that. Sometimes I get tired of “literature”. Sometimes I just want brain muck. Some way to spend all this free time I have to ponder my existence.

Hell, it makes me wonder what I used to do for fun! Cooking? Cleaning? Doing the Laundry? All those things got done, but I wouldn’t exactly call them fun.

What did I used to do for fun!! I have drawn the most euphemistic blank.

Moving to a new location brings with it certain adjustments like where do I hike? Where should I wash my laundry? I actually have to take my laundry to a laundromat? Is it cool to walk around the block late at night? Where do I grocery shop? Eat? See movies?

I tend to go back to my old neighborhoods. Berkeley can be infamously expensive. Oakland and Emeryville less so. And I liked my old hiking trails up in the Oakland Hills, but Tilden park is alright as well. That’s where I’ve been going as of late. Except not enough. Because this morning my dog was going completely berserk. She hauled each of her toys out of her crate and took them to the yard to desecrate their very existence, whipping her head back and forth and pouncing, running like a jackrabbit with a wolf on it’s tail, squatting like a big clown in order to pounce suddenly. Nothing was free from her antics. Not gardening gloves. Not the used-to-be-a garden. And certainly not her squeaky stuffed toy frog.

I’m not doing her justice by being such a homebody; I don’t want to walk anywhere or go anywhere or drive anywhere cause gas is to expensive and I check the odometer every second I’m on the road lately.

Oh yes. And the fridge has been empty for weeks! Domestic? ME?