Mind and Memory: Downsizing A Book Collection After a Death

 

I have in my house anywhere from 400-500 books, roughly calculated. These books range from poetry to histories of people and civilizations to political screeds to science fiction and literary novels to books on the natural world and our place in it. In my widowhood, I am trying to downsize in many ways. The first was moving to a much smaller house on a small urban lot. The second was placing in a storage unit all that I could not fit into my house until my adult children could decide what they want of the family furniture, their childhood toys and books, and their father's tools. Now I am trying to downsize the number of books I own, and I find the process difficult.

Books are more than an accumulation of words. They represent our interests, our hobbies, our obsessions. They evoke memories: This book I read to Tom when we were traveling to Houston, Texas, for his cancer treatment. I collected these books when I was directing a program for Japanese students at a university in Georgia. Here is a book by an author whom Tom admired. (Should I read it as homage to him?) These are books given as gifts to us by our children. Those books are all by a British novelist whose writing I loved so much I collected over the years as many of her books as I could find online or on dusty shelves of second-hand bookstores. This stack of books on a shelf represent a time and place: Arizona, when I was living there and reading about Native Americans in the West; Texas, when I first began gardening with herbs; Minnesota, when I was learning to identify the native flora there. And so on.

And though I have read many of these books, many others have not been opened as the life of the mind gave way to the incessant call of daily tasks and diversions. So as I take this book from the shelf, I determine its fate with a bit of guilt. Should I give it another try? Or has my interest in that subject now been replaced by other interests?

I also have discovered that online reading--whether news reports, magazine articles, or Twitter--have affected my attention span. A book has to be really engaging for me to stay interested. I have also recently subscribed to Audible and have discovered that listening to someone read while I crochet or do some other craft is more efficient than trying to watch on Netflix those dark and cold Scandinavian mystery series I like so much. No losing a stitch while reading subtitles!

I want to cull this book collection with emotionless precision, identifying and rejecting every book I know that I will never read or turn to for reference. But that means being honest with myself and recognizing that so many obsessions and interests faded quickly as more mundane tasks took precedence. That means letting go of some dreams and aspirations. And these books are a kind of map to my and Tom's shared intellectual life, its incompleteness, its abrupt and much-too-soon disruption by Tom's death, leaving me adrift in a sea of sorrow in which nothing seems quite as important as it once did. All those books I bought to inform me of the world lose their charm in the swells of grief. And yet, it's hard to let go as they anchor me to a life I once led.