Home Is Where The Books Are

All my life, I’ve yearned to be away. Away is where everything happens. Away is where horizons get expanded. Away is where you can shed your skin and try on a different way of being. Its appeal is obvious.

But I’ve come to appreciate that home counts for something too. Home is where I retreat, restore, and relax. Where I level out and lick my wounds. Where the clothes are comfy. Where, as Aminatou Sow says, the wifi connects automatically.

Home is also, importantly, the one place on earth that reflects me. Not the idealized version of me – that person buys only Danish modern and has Marie Kondo’d herself to a perfectly minimalist state – but the me that has emerged accidentally after decades of accumulating things and attempting to artfully arrange them. And let’s be honest – those things are mostly books.

Books surround me here. They stand in structurally unsound towers. They’re mashed into a million configurations. They seem to multiply helplessly, as though it’s not me clicking ‘buy’ on Amazon almost daily. And while they don’t look organized, they are (albeit only in the most rudimentary way). Here are the rules:

1. Books I’m about to read go on the coffee table. An on-ramp of sorts.
2. All other unread books sit together on the bookshelf by the couch. My own personal bookstore.
3. My husband’s horrible fantasy fiction is consigned to a bottom shelf by the window, obscured from view by our kitchen table.

But no matter where they’re shelved, my books all have one thing in common – I treat them terribly. I crease the covers; sever the spines. I’ve exposed them to the grime of thousands of subway rides, greasy dinners, and sandy beach bags. I went through a phase when I circled, underlined, and scrawled all over them. The sun has bleached them, time has yellowed them, visitors have dog-eared them. I’ve packed and repacked them endlessly – 13 apartments in 13 years. And yet they’re still spectacular.

My books are also a great marker of time. The only children's books I still have are Little Miss Busy and The Witches by Roald Dahl. The latter was the first book that truly dazzled and terrified me, and my copy is so worn it looks mutilated. In high school, I mostly read Vice magazine and music biographies, so I have adolescent angst to thank for a glut of Rolling Stone anthologies and a copy of Hammer of the Gods that I stole from a library in Prince Edward Island. I also bought a ton of Penguin Classics around that time because I liked the covers; most remain unread. In college, I entered a dark period of subsisting on Shopaholic books and true crime paperbacks – I've managed to eradicate most evidence of that era. My recent guilty-pleasure has been vapid lifestyle books by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz; those get hidden in much the same way as my husband's bad books about dragons.

I sometimes imagine a world in which all these books anthropomorphize, Toy Story-like, into people with personalities that correspond to their authors or subject matter. Would factions form – highbrow works like James Joyce’s Ulysses claiming the corner furthest from populist page-turners like Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies? Would the depressives – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Elie Wiesel’s Night among them – come together to commiserate? Would everyone vote Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged off the shelf? Would they walk right out of the apartment and find themselves a better owner?

Books, if you're reading this, please don’t. I need you.