A Love Letter to Actual, Physical Books; or Why I'm a Hoarder

This week I'm wrong about bound pages containing ideas and stories, plus a screenwriting class colliding with my growing understanding of myself

This is just one part of my book collection. Yes I live in a studio, and no, I don’t need the space for anything else.

This morning and afternoon, rather than write or do chores or anything else vaguely productive, I went to a cafe and I read a book. Specifically, I finished a paperback copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which I can safely and conservatively say is the best book I’ve ever read about two cousins falling in love and a wealthy family stealing their poor, well-behaved nieces to replace their embarrassing daughters.

It’s been a while since I’ve had the focus and mental tranquility to just sit down for hours and read, and it felt amazing. More than the specific novel, the act of sitting down with a physical book and turning the worn, battered pages (all my books are fairly beat-up) was deeply cathartic.

So this whole post is a love letter to physical books.

This is not an attack on Kindles or other electronic book devices. I love that for you, if that’s what gets you reading. This is also not a lament about how people don’t read enough anymore. I don’t have anything against reading stuff online (thank you for reading this) and I try not to be a snob about how people consume media.

But it is a devotional to the specific joys and wonders of holding a book—a bundle of paper pages bound together with cover art and some blurbed reviews, and maybe something like a foreword or some critical essays or the first chapter of a future novel, or if you’re especially lucky, a map—and reading and loving (or not loving) and then having that book in your life forever through its physical presence.

I have, give or take, 500 books. That’s more books than square feet in my apartment. I refuse to give them up, even though I’ve moved six times in my adult life and increasingly that just means loading those books into more and more boxes and bins. Each book is precious, even (especially?) when I didn’t care for it that much.

I started collecting books for myself during middle school book fairs. I actually had what I called a “reading list”–I would re-read all of my favorite editions of my favorite books every year from 4th through 10th grade. If I remember correctly, they included The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Secret of Nimh, The Midnight for Charlie Bone series, The Lost Years of Merlin, and especially the Redwall series. My obsession with Redwall was so central to my identity that I hosted a party where we made all the recipes and played all the games from the books—and the guest list was STRICT about eligibility. If you didn’t know what kind of woodland animal Skipper was, or patrolled the tunnels of Salamandastron, or especially loved Turnip n’ Tater n’ Beetroot Pie, then you absolutely could not attend.

Then collecting became a habit. As an adult, I struggled to walk into a bookstore and not come away with one (or several) books. If I read something I borrowed from a friend or colleague, I HAD to own it. Even if I didn’t like it. Especially then. My bookshelves became a record of the voyages I’d taken, the ideas I’d consumed, the stories that made up the food of my imagination. I love seeing other people’s books—I judge pretty heavily on what I see they’ve decided to keep—and somewhere along the line it became critical that everyone get to see everything about me I could show them. I didn’t want to hide. My books feel like part of who I am. Judge me.

Something you could judge would be my favorite authors. I have a lot of books by Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, China Miéville, Jane Austen, Rick Riordan, N.K. Jemisen. They each say something true about me, or at least an era of my life (certainly that I like speculative fiction).

Something I’ve been struggling with in recent years is what to do with books whose contents, or authors, don’t match my values. The obvious example is Harry Potter and JK Rowling’s transphobia. I don’t buy anything by her anymore, and I got rid of my unread copies of her detective novels, but I feel weird about hiding that I did (do) love the original series. I see its flaws and its limited perspective, now, I don’t worship them as peerless texts, but they were fun. They were important to a younger version of myself. I don’t want to hide them.

I have a book given to me by a friend that I devoured— a popcorn thriller—that I then gifted another copy of to my brother. He thoughtfully texted me about how he couldn’t keep reading because it was so Islamophobic. Initially I was full of justifications—depiction isn’t endorsement (which is true), character flaws can be revealing and still troubling (also true)—but then I went back and looked at the book, and it was racist and Islamophobic. It came across in easily skipped-over moments, but it was an ideologically bigoted book. I had missed it. I keep that book, because it reminds me I’m often wrong and that I don’t always see everything the first time, and that even fun books carry ideology and should be read thoughtfully.

I do donate books I haven’t read if I decide I won’t ever get to them. My “to be read” stack of books is a daily taunt, a humbling reminder of the difference between my ambition and how I live my daily life.

You could also judge my organization. I have two overlapping systems—books I’ve read are stored vertically, and books I haven’t read yet are horizontal. Within the books I’ve read, I sort by genre and era—books that are urban fantasy go together, realist drama goes together, linguistics non-fiction books go together, etc. I try to have them on a gradient so one category flows into another. I love when people notice interesting pairings. I respect authors who show up in different sections of my shelf.

Once, on a date, a beautiful young woman told me she sorted her books by color. I was horrified (this moment is loosely adapted in my romcom screenplay). I believe this is a morally and logistically wrong way to store books. I think it shows a fundamental lack of interest in what books ARE, because it’s not decoration. It was the first sign that relationship wouldn’t work out—it did end, after (but not because) I saw the shelf in person, and was horrified all over again.

I can’t even begin to explain everything I love about physical books. Here’s a start.

I love how books give moments a location. Something happens not just in the text, but on part of a specific page—I can tell you Gatsby kisses Daisy for the first time, in his memory, on the bottom of a lefthand page about two-thirds of the way through the novel. In my childhood copy of Where the Red Fern Grows, Little Ann dies at the top of a right-hand page. I know because I stared at it, sobbing, for twenty minutes before I kept reading.

I love what seeing the condition of books tells you. I mentioned already my books are all worn down—what I call well loved—I am not someone who wants my prized possessions in pristine condition. A book should make you wrestle with yourself; it should leave you tired and battered; a book should reflect the state it leaves you in. I throw too many books in the bottom of my bag every time I travel, sure I’ll read more than I will, and they inevitably get mangled into each other. Reading a book should result in you twisting its spine in stress, tearing corners in your eagerness to get to the next page. I wrote a derogatory poem about someone in college (I have never written more embarrassing words than those words) with the lines “His shelf was filled with many heavy books/ Their covers with intimidating looks/ From little suffereing of wear and tear,/ Because removal from their place was rare.”

I love that reopening a book you’ve read before doesn’t just remind you of the words, but where you were when you first read them. A stain sparks the memory of slurping soup as I crammed a chapter of Passing before teaching it. A mutilated spine reminds me how I kept my copy of Redwall open on my classroom desk in middle school so I could read in any momentary pause during class. My copy of Dune reminds me of the decomposing couch where I spent most of my isolated fall of 2020.

I love how specific books remind me of specific people. My copy of The Amulet of Samarkand from The Bartimaeus Trilogy reminds me of my best friend in middle school, who used it as the inspiration for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign we played together (it’s also the most under-rated YA series of all time, IMO). My copy of Moby Dick reminds me of my former boss who bought it for me as a Christmas present, and who I love catching up with now that we’ve both moved to New York. I own three (pretty good) books about teaching and writing by Mark Edmundson, my college professor who I visited every time I returned to school, and who never remembered my name but did always have time for a twenty minute chat, and to give me a copy of one of his books.

I love how certain books make me think about where I found them. My copy of American Gods was something I picked up on my last day in Cape Town after a summer teaching in college; I read it on the plane ride home. My illustrated edition of The Hobbit is the same edition as the one I read in fourth grade, that I loved so much I convinced my parents to let me audition for a musical adaptation at OperaDelaware that sparked a lifelong love of theater. I found My Bookstore, a collection of essays by famous authors about their favorite bookstores, at a bookstore in Princeton after spending a day grading papers at Small World Coffee (still the best grading location I’ve ever found), when I saw an essay about MY favorite bookstore—the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont—on the first page I flipped to (my other favorite bookstores—the best third spaces that exist, in my opinion—include Politics and Prose in DC, and Green Light Books and Books are Magic in Brooklyn. I once saw Carey Mulligan at a bookstore in Columbus, Ohio, which felt cool because I was teaching The Great Gatsby, but that’s a story for another time).

Other books make me think about who I read them with. My copies of The Broken Earth Trilogy remind me of one of my best friends because I got us both a copy of the first book one holiday season—N.K. Jemisen is now one of my favorite authors. I did the same thing with another friend and Miss Benson’s Beetle, which turned out to be one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. I have several books (I won’t reveal which) I bought and read because someone I had a crush on was reading them, and I wanted a reason to talk to them.

Books that were gifts to me are some of my favorites—friends who I’ve fallen out of touch with, distant family members, but also past versions of the people I love most are kept alive by their space on the shelf. My copy of The Little Prince has a note from a person I spent a delirious 48 hours with leading up to Valentines Day 2016, and haven’t seen since. My neighbor in Brooklyn gave me The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s hilarious and poignantly tragic novel that’s my favorite book of the last few years. Another one of my best friends just gave me a sci-fi book called The Mountain in the Sea that I know I’ll always love, if only because it’s the first fiction book she’s recommended to me in our entire friendship.

I love lending my books away. I do have a running list of all my books living in diaspora, and expect them to return home one day, but it makes me happy to give a small part of myself to someone. If they love it as much as I do, it’s an affirmation of our friendship I treasure. If they don’t, I obsessively try to matchmake for them again.

Books—the physical things, the objects—are precious. I love them unconditionally. Come judge my collection.

Knowing Myself

Reading over the beginning of this post, I’m reminded that I am very strange. I have weird habits and ways of thinking, which I’m very committed to, but often drive other people crazy. That’s probably true for a lot of people, but it’s definitely true for me. My friend Mara, when I show these traits a little too much, loves to say I have “a beautiful brain.”

In the past few years, I’ve had some conversations with the people who know me best where we’ve discussed the possibility I may be somewhere on the spectrum, or that certainly some of my personal strengths and struggles might fit into that framework. Whether or not that’s true isn’t really important to me—it’s been a useful way to think about the person I am and the best version of myself I’m trying to be.

It did lead to—and thankfully, prepare me for—a funny moment in one of my screenwriting classes. My script is loosely inspired by my life and one of the characters is an exaggerated version of me. In my first workshop, introducing a pitch sheet of the general plot and characters, I spoke at length about how personal the project was for me and how the character of Hunter was very much a self-insert.

One of my (talented, thoughtful, insightful) classmates, a few minutes later, made a comment that either showed she had a lot of respect for me or maybe that she missed a little of my introduction.

She said, “I love the character of Hunter. He’s very autism-coded to me.”

She then gave me incredible and useful feedback, but I will confess I was very focused on that initial comment. It’s a memory I cherish (and shared immediately with many of my friends), but I am glad I did some work towards self-understanding before it happened.