Reading our lives

Nicci:

I've just read, very belatedly, a feature by James Wood in last November's New Yorker, in which he describes sorting through his dead father-in-law's library of books and asks how much we can tell of a person's life and self from what they have on their bookshelves. In Wood's case, he concludes that we can tell less than we might imagine (although in a piece that was a curious mixture of intimacy and cool dispassion, his father-in-law emerges as a fierce lover of learning, a prickly and fervent self-educator).



But it made me wonder what someone would make of our bookshelves, were they to walk round them like a detective looking for clues. Although we repeatedly attempt to cull them before they overrun the house, we own a lot of books and we try to put them in categories - otherwise the best place to loose a book is among crowds of books. It's not what individual books you own that describes you, but the categories that speak. Apart from obvious ones - classics, modern novels, thrillers, biographies, poetry - it is clear from a cursory glance someone (Sean) reads a lot of books on moral philosophy and history, particularly modern history. He has dozens and dozens of books on the Second World War. Adrienne Rich and Kate Millet and Germaine Greer and Ellen Moers and books about the backlash and about pornography jostle together. We obviously make more resolutions than we can keep: there are several feet of often untouched teach-yourself-language books (Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Modern Greek….). It could be deduced - from all the literary criticism, as well as from earnest pencilled remarks written next to Eliot's poetry or down the margins of Ulysses - that one or both of us studied English at university. We like cooking - far more cookery books than we could ever need. We like roses, birds, English trees. We like maps. Grammar. Graphic novels. We probably have a greenhouse. We like biking and walking. We like wild swimming. When we go to an exhibition we tend to buy the catalogue. There are chess players in the house. We have children who are now grown up - there's a set of shelves in the corridor full of beloved children's books, with cracked spines and pages coming loose: The Mousehole Cat, all of Dr Seuss, the Moomintroll books, The Owl Babies, All Join In… read aloud over and over again. Next to Sean's side of the bed is an entire bookshelf devoted to the hundreds of books he is in the process of reading: each one of them has a bookmark of some kind showing where he's got to. Books I read are stained and battered, with turned down pages: Indian mud and Greek sand and Swedish lake water are held inside the covers. 



Then there are numerous odd shelves: books on mountaineering (for writing Killing Me Softly), memoirs by people who were stalked (Beneath the Skin), Freud, Jung, Klein, police handbooks, forensic medical books. Books about London. About dreams. About night. About pain and death. About hidden rivers.  



Recently I helped my parents moved from the family home. They never throw anything away - there were seed catalogues from the Seventies and B&B guides from the Eighties, text books dating back to my father's university days. There was a Guinness Book of Records from decades ago, school atlases of the world before vast countries split apart and spawned dozens of new ones. My father doesn't read much anymore, except poetry, and my mother's blind and so can only listen to audiobooks. Yet these old books have taken their place on the new shelves because somehow they seem to represent the lives of the people who have owned and loved them.