Why Did I Bother to Salvage These Books?
I categorize the books on my shelves into two broad but distinct categories: books I have purchased and books I have found. Books I have purchased are either books I really wanted or books I needed for some university course or other. Books I have found are a hodgepodge collection of titles I salvaged mostly from New York City dustbins and curbsides where stumbling across entire collections of books left on a street corner is quite common. Some of the books I found in New York are treasures – Goethe’s Italian Journey, Wheelock’s Latin, a hardcover edition of David Copperfield, a collection of poems by Coleridge. Others, not so much.
I took a good, hard look at my bookshelf today and asked myself why I even bothered salvaging the seven hardcover Tom Clancy novels I had noticed in a neat stack on the corner of 32nd Street and Ditmars in Astoria, Queens nine years ago. I have had all seven for nearly a decade, but I have never even considered opening one, and I very much doubt I ever will read any of them. Yet there they are – a row of massive, bulky rectangles lined up on the shelf next to my desk. And Tom Clancy is but the tip of the iceberg. Here is a brief list of other questionable books I picked up somewhere in the past and took home with me under the delusion that I might one day read them:Five Acres and Independence, M.G KairnsCancer Free!The God Delusion, Richard DawkinsThe Portable Atheist, Christopher HitchensThe Girl Who Kicked People in the Face (or whatever the exact titles of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy are).Stitch n Bitch: The Complete Knitter’s HandbookRonald Reagan: An American LifeHow to Make the Stock Market Make Money for YouMargaret Thatcher: The Path to PowerThe Complete Guide to Import/ExportAbout 100 Harlequin romances not even my wife will touchEisenhower at WarA half-dozen novels by Robert LudlumThe Secret Lives of John LennonThe Window Style Book
And at least fifty other titles I will likely never, ever read. Well, I may glance at the atheist books just to get a feel for the arguments, and I could read a Ludlum book in the summer sometime, but somehow I just cannot foresee myself ever settling down into a chair to flip through The Window Style Book.
If I still lived in America or Canada, I would try to sell these books, or I would simply give them to some charity shop, but I live in Hungary now, which means Eat to Beat Cancer and Hammer! by Armand Hammer will probably stay on my shelves until I die.
I took a good, hard look at my bookshelf today and asked myself why I even bothered salvaging the seven hardcover Tom Clancy novels I had noticed in a neat stack on the corner of 32nd Street and Ditmars in Astoria, Queens nine years ago. I have had all seven for nearly a decade, but I have never even considered opening one, and I very much doubt I ever will read any of them. Yet there they are – a row of massive, bulky rectangles lined up on the shelf next to my desk. And Tom Clancy is but the tip of the iceberg. Here is a brief list of other questionable books I picked up somewhere in the past and took home with me under the delusion that I might one day read them:Five Acres and Independence, M.G KairnsCancer Free!The God Delusion, Richard DawkinsThe Portable Atheist, Christopher HitchensThe Girl Who Kicked People in the Face (or whatever the exact titles of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy are).Stitch n Bitch: The Complete Knitter’s HandbookRonald Reagan: An American LifeHow to Make the Stock Market Make Money for YouMargaret Thatcher: The Path to PowerThe Complete Guide to Import/ExportAbout 100 Harlequin romances not even my wife will touchEisenhower at WarA half-dozen novels by Robert LudlumThe Secret Lives of John LennonThe Window Style Book
And at least fifty other titles I will likely never, ever read. Well, I may glance at the atheist books just to get a feel for the arguments, and I could read a Ludlum book in the summer sometime, but somehow I just cannot foresee myself ever settling down into a chair to flip through The Window Style Book.
If I still lived in America or Canada, I would try to sell these books, or I would simply give them to some charity shop, but I live in Hungary now, which means Eat to Beat Cancer and Hammer! by Armand Hammer will probably stay on my shelves until I die.
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