Reorganizing the Library

For many years, I organized my books broadly by genre (the genres being typically fiction/literature, non-fiction, anthology, art, poetry, classics, drama, reference, travel, children's) and then alphabetically by author, and chronologically within a single author's work. I worked in a bookstore and a library when I was younger and this just seemed like the right -- the natural way. Fiction outstrips all the other genres in my library by an order of magnitude, so it's the only place the organizing principle matters much. In August of 2018, I undertook a radical reorganization of my fiction collection and put my books in order geographically (and then loosely chronologically, where there were enough books from one country for it to matter). I chose the geographic organization because I thought it would help me in my world books project. When I imagined it, I pictured my bookshelves being like a map. I put Canada on the top left and Australia on the bottom right, but with over- and under-representation, it didn't quite pan out how it was in my imagination. The UK took up more than a quarter of my shelf space and the U.S. almost as much. The entire continent of Africa and the whole of Latin America took up just 1/16 of the total shelf space each. The sheer size of the collections from the UK and US (and to a lesser extent France) gave them prominance of place, and it sometimes felt like regions that are marginalized geopolitically also became marginalized on my shelves -- especially Latin America, which was relegated to the darkest bottom corner of my bookcase. Perhaps I could have done some active work to move the margins to the center, but that would have been a difficult organizing principle to figure out. The flaws aside, I mostly liked the geographic organization. I found it made me think deliberately about diverse voices and representation when I was browsing for books to read.

But, this weekend, I had a little time on my hands and a little frantic energy to direct at an absurd project, so I decided to reorganize my fiction, again. I think a chronological concept had been floating around in my head for a while; I always imagined it as a chronology in order of publication date. But I hate separating an author's work (one reason the organizing by color principle has never appealed to me). Then I hit upon the idea of making it chronological by the authors' year of birth and it just seemed right.

Cervantes (b. 1547) is first, of course -- as he should be! (unless I were to pull my copy of the Odyssey from the classics section and give Homer pride of place) -- and by almost a century. After that comes Madame de Lafayette (b. 1634) -- her book, The Princess of Cleves, is the oldest novel I've read. Samuel Richardson (b. 1689) rounds out the 17th Century, but come 1700, there are a lot more authors and then things really pick up in 1802 (the year in which both Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were born). Last, is Niviaq Korneliussen (b. in 1990) from Greenland. (Though actually I just packed up Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (b. 1991) -- probably the youngest author I've read -- to send to to a friend, and I also read her book Normal People last fall, but gave it to another friend, so this represents just what I have at home.)

Because I am still also geographically focused, it's interesting to see when the first authors from different parts of the world start showing up. With Cervantes, Spain is first, but nothing else comes from Spain for nearly 3 centuries until Benito Pérez Galdós (b. 1843) turns up. For a long while it's all French, English, and later also Russian, with the occasional American thrown in. The first American is Edgar Allen Poe (b. 1809). The first Italian is Italo Svevo (b. 1861). The first non-American from the western hemisphere is the Mexican writer, Mariano Azuela (b. 1873). There's an interesting little spurt of Austrians (or subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the births of Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, and Ernst Weiss (born in 1880, 1881, and 1882, respectively). By continents, apart from Europe and North America, which are covered previously, the first South American author is Jorge Luis Borges, born in 1899. The first African author is Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911) and the first sub-Saharan African authors are Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Camara Laye, both born in 1928. The first author from Asia is a bit complicated. I have a copy of the 1937 Azerbaijani novel, Ali and Nino, but the authorship of that book is disputed. I'm a bit surprised myself to find that the next Asian writer is the Sri Lankan/Canadian writer, Michael Ondaatje, (b. 1943). I've read a couple older authors from Asia, Kōbō Abe (b. 1924) being the first, if memory serves, but I no longer have the books.

What I like about reorganizing my books is that it gives me a new point of entry into my library. This organizing principle has me thinking about the connections between authors I hadn't previously thought of as connected. The shelf in the center of my 3 units right at eye level spans the birth years 1922 to 1926 and includes some incredible writers and personal favorites: José Saramago, Italo Calvino, James Baldwin, José Donoso, and John Berger all sit on this shelf. What a group! (It's not all men: Joan Aiken and Nadine Gordimer also live here.) Calvino and Baldwin must have lived in Paris at the same time, and Berger was also living in France, though in the countryside. In fact, Donoso was not too far away, in Spain, from 1967-1980. Meanwhile, though it's not so far from Spain to Portugal, I think Saramago was living in an entirely different world. And yet the ideological and political parallels between him and Berger and Calvino, at least, are strong. Another fascinating parallel among all five of these writers is that they spent a significant portion of their lives in self-imposed exile.

Another fun cluster of my favorites is a shelf a little lower on the left hand side, spanning 1951 to 1953. It begins with Javier Marías and ends with Roberto Bolaño and Hilary Mantel and Orhan Pamuk sit between them. I don't imagine quite the allegiance among these four that I saw in the group above, but when I think about their writing, maybe there is some shared sensibility that comes with the age?

I'll close with some other random observations:

• The first black writer is Alexandre Dumas (b. 1802); the second is Nella Larsen (b. 1891). What different worlds they inhabited and wrote about!
• The most well represented years are 1943, 1947, and 1955, with eight authors each. 
• If I had to name one thing that surprised me, it would be that Raymond Chandler was born in 1888. I would have guessed him a generation younger (i.e., in my grandparents' generation not my great-grandparents').

Devil on the Cross, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Twenty years ago, if you had asked me, I would have said Ngũgĩ was my favorite writer. At the time, I had read just three of his books; all early works. I don't know that I've written about it here -- or much elsewhere for that matter -- but I wasn't much of a reader growing up, and even when I started college. I date the beginning of my reading life to the semester in 1996 that I spent in Harare, Zimbabwe. (Suddenly, I feel maybe I have written about this before?) I had a lot of free time, and not much of a social life. The Syracuse University outpost where I took most of my classes had a small library (basically a bookshelf from which we were free to borrow books). The books I remember reading from that library are Sula, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and two books by Ngũgĩ: Weep Not, Child and The River Between. The semester before I went to Zimbabwe, I was a student at Oberlin College and Weep Not, Child had been assigned reading in a class I took on African religion, but I didn't read it. (As I said, at that time, I was not yet a reader.) But when I did finally pick up Weep Not, Child it stunned me. What I found so stunning about it - and also about A Grain of Wheat, which I read later and also loved, was the complexity of the characters and the empathy Ngũgĩ showed for them in his writing. No one was all good or all bad. Weep Not, Child, to tell it very simply, is a love story in the midst of a revolution between two people whose moments never align. First one puts the revolution before all else while the other just wants to go one with life, and then their roles reverse -- and you understand why in each case. It's poignant and beautiful. In any case, after reading those three books, I didn't go back to Ngũgĩ for some time. It wasn't really a conscious decision - I continued to think of him as one of my favorite writers and every year at Nobel time when his name showed up high on the lists of the English oddsmakers, I would always hope (and still do) that this would be his year. When, in 2008, I happened to stumble across a new(ish) novel of his at a bookstore, I was thrilled. I bought and read Wizard of the Crow right away. It was quite different from his earlier work -- more satirical and allegorical -- but I loved it too.

I can't speak with complete authority, because there's one book (Petals of Blood) and a few plays that I have not read between the three early books I read in my youth and Devil on the Cross, but I suspect that Devil on the Cross marks the change in style. It is the first novel Ngũgĩ wrote in Gikuyu, and he wrote it on toilet paper while imprisoned after his arrest for the political message in the play he cowrote, I Will Marry When I Want. Devil on the Cross centers around five characters who meet in a matatu (a private van sort of like a long distance version of a NYC dollar van) from Narobi to Ilmorog, plus the driver. At Ilmorog, they all attend a competition in "Modern Theft and Robbery." The narrative is structured almost entirely as a series of personal narratives. In the matatu on the way to Ilmorog, each character shares his or her own story with the other passengers. When they arrive at the competition, the each competitor shares his own story of thieving and robbing. The first competitor, who steals to feed himself, is thrown out as a common criminal. The subsequent competitors all try to outdo one another in their capitalist exploitations to impress the members of the Organization of Modern Theft and Robbery, headquartered in New York, USA. The allegories are heavy handed: this is clearly the writing of someone disillusioned by the state of affairs in post-independence Kenya. (The book is dedicated "To all Kenyans struggling against the neo-colonial stage of imperialism.) But even with the blunt force messaging, there are moments of beauty and of hilarity. And the end! I saw the twist that was coming maybe 30 pages from the end, but I didn't know how it would play out. The end is like the most perfect blaxploitation ending; it should be a movie.

Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, by Manuel Puig

I can't remember who posted it, but not too long ago on Twitter I saw someone citing Elmore Leonard's writing/editing advice, "Try to leave out the part that people skip." This person on Twitter went on to posit something along the lines of, "What do you never skip? Dialogue." Now, I'm not a reader who's not put off by a solid block of words that may stretch on for pages, unbroken by dialogue (as my love for Javier Marías will attest). As a writer, I don't do much dialogue either. Manuel Puig falls at the complete opposite end of the spectrum: only dialogue. It takes some getting used to as a reader, and in this book it can be especially confusing because of the general unreliability of the dialogists. Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages is, mainly, a conversation between Mr. Ramirez, an aging and unwell union organizer and activist who spent years in prison in Argentina under the dictatorship, and Larry, a history Ph.D. with Marxist sympathies who is paid to keep Mr. Ramirez company and take him on walks from his nursing home in Greenwich Village. Mr. Ramirez suffers from depression and paranoia and has forgotten much of his life before prison. He asks Larry to tell him about his life in the hopes of making connections to his own experiences and drawing out memory. Or something. Meanwhile, Larry is trying to decipher the notebooks Mr. Ramirez kept in prison, and to draw him out and make him remember his past. But contradictions and conflicting stories abound. Some of the conversations clearly exist only in Mr. Ramirez' imagination.

I read - and adored - Kiss of the Spider Woman years ago. There were similar notes (and the similar dialogic narrative) in Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much.

Bruno, Chief of Police, by Martin Walker

Some time ago, I found a trove of excellent condition Bruno mysteries at my regular thrift shop. I wasn't familiar with the series, but I bought the whole stack. I have several partially complete collections of murder mystery series. I must write this every time I read a murder mystery, but the TV I watch consists almost exclusively of murder mysteries. I enjoy reading them as well, but rarely prioritize reading them. So my many partial collections remain mostly unread. (The one exception is Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books, the first four of which I read in the space of a year. I completely missed that a new one came out last year!) I guess when I do pick up a murder mystery to read, I'm usually looking for something specific. A quick, absorbing read to be sure. Part of me is, I think, also looking for what I get from the TV shows: something I will want to go back to again and again. That's surely why I'm drawn to the series, in theory.

As a natural completist, I always feel I have to start at the beginning (a rule I've broken a couple times and usually regretted). Bruno, Chief of Police, is the first of this series, set in the Dordogne in southern France. Food, drink, and the weekly market play a big role in this book and are described with enthusiasm (so much so that these books made an appearance in the NY Times Food section). It's a bit to the southeast of where this book is set, but I kept picturing the village of Mirepoix in the Ariège, which I visited last year, as I was reading this. I'm not in any rush to jump into the rest of the series, but this was an enjoyable read.

Circe, by Madeline Miller

How many times have I wished I had nothing to do but sit at home and read? Well, I guess my time has come. Of course, not every book is conducive to hours straight of reading. This is especially true under the present conditions, where the things running on in the back of one's mind can be distracting when a book isn't adequately engaging. I set aside Manuel Puig's Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages, which I started earlier this week, for this reason (though I likely will go back to it -- I just can't decide if I should do so now or later).

In the simpler times that were not even two weeks ago, I went to brunch with some friends and afterwards we all stopped by the West Village Housing Works thrift store. There, I picked up the Puig mentioned above, the Rachel Cusk book I finished last week, a James Salter book, and Madeline Miller's Circe (all for $9 and change; books at the thrift stores are much cheaper than at the Housing Works bookstore, but of course the selection is smaller and hit or miss). I was especially excited about Circe as I had read and loved The Song of Achilles over two days at the end of December and had heard lots of praise for Circe as well. And so, when I was scanning my shelves for a good stay-at-home-and-do-nothing-but-read book, Circe seemed like an obvious choice. I can attest now that it was the right one.

As I made clear when I wrote about The Song of Achilles, I don't know much in the way of Greek mythology. I had seen the name Circe, but that was about the limit. I didn't know about the split between the Titans and the Olympians (though the crossword puzzler in me is glad to know it now; several times I've come across clues related to Titans and while I can often summon up the names I'm happy to finally have a better understanding of who they refer to). I sort of knew the stories of the Minotaur; of Medea; of Daedalus and Icarus. (It's so strange to think how these stories filter in; I'd love to have a better understanding of how I absorbed what knowledge I do have.) In any case, the story that unwound in Circe was, for me, even more of a complete mystery than The Song of Achilles. And what a beautiful story it was.

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

I started Interpreter of Maladies near the end of last year and have been reading the stories from it off and on since, on breaks from other books or between books. I'm not much of a reader of short stories. It's a little hard to articulate why, but they don't really suit my typical style of reading. I think a short story should be read beginning to end, in one sitting. That is how I read most of this book, one story here before bed, one story there in the morning. Maybe one story was the length of a commute somewhere. It's hard for me even to know how to write about a book of stories. Each is its own self-contained thing. This book had nine of them. I read, three or four in the last few days of 2019. Then one or two in mid-January when it was the weekend and I was between books. (I don't usually start a new book on the weekend. I like to start new books in the morning on a weekday, giving over my 40 or so minutes of subway time to getting into the book. So if I do read on the weekend, short stories are a good option.) I read the last four stories yesterday and today, after coming to a breaking point in the other book I was reading and wanting something different.

Even as I set the book aside from time to time, I was sure I would go back and finish all the stories. They are really lovely; all of them. Lahiri treats her characters with such tenderness and sensitivity. The first (which has stayed with me these months) and last stories make excellent bookends.

Outline, by Rachel Cusk

Firstly, I need to congratulate the publisher of the edition of Outline that I read for not mentioning the narrator's name in the back cover blurb. Cusk revealed it on page 211 and I was in ignorance until that moment, which is how I like it.

Secondly, this book was fantastic. It reminded me of some other things that I'm having a hard time placing, though among them are Sepharad and Le Feu Follet - the common feature among the three being that they focus on interactions and stories within stories within stories told second or third hand.

I also found while reading Outline that I felt my own interactions, overhearings, and observations feeling as though they took on the same quality of remove. I can't wait to read the other two books in the trilogy.

Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney

After finishing Severance, I needed something completely different. I scanned my shelves and settled on Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends, which I had picked up right around the new year after reading and enjoying her Normal People far more than I expected to. I didn't like Conversation with Friends quite as much as Normal People, but it did turn out to be just the kind of book I needed right now. Rooney's prose is wonderfully precise. Her characters face problems that are normal and small, but take on outsize proportion in the moment -- the way our own problems often do.

In a funny way, this book was maybe not so different from Severance. Both are intensely of the present. And both feature disaffected and confused narrators who are grappling with ill-defined relationships of a very modern nature. Severance asks what happens when this character is faced with actually earth-shattering events, while Conversations with Friends follows its narrator through the, by comparison, mundane trials of regular life.

Severance, by Ling Ma

Earlier this year I was having lunch with a colleague and chatting about books. I was reading Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me at the time and she was reading Severance. I don't remember where, but I had heard something about Severance right around that time, and my colleague said it was really good and offered to loan it to me when she finished it. Fast forward six weeks or so, and this colleague and I found ourselves on the same flight to Las Vegas for a conference. After we landed, we were comparing notes and found that we had both finished our books on the flight over. We agreed to swap books so we would have something to read on the flight home. I asked what she was reading and it was Severance. "Weren't you reading that months ago?" I asked. Between our January lunch and now, she had gone on vacation and decided Severance wasn't the vacation read she needed and it had taken some time to get back to. And then when she did go back to it, she said it was very strange. It was very strange to read right now. Having read it myself now, I understand.

Severance, which is about a young woman who is among a small group of survivors of a pandemic fungal infection, described scenes early in the outbreak that were eerily similar to what we are seeing and hearing today. It was actually rather harrowing to read this last week, as my company cancelled all work travel and implemented a self-quarantine policy for people who've traveled to certain areas. I cancelled personal travel to Italy the day before starting this book and scheduled a trip to Spain in its place. In the lead up to my vacation, I've been checking the CDC website regularly, washing my hands furiously, and am so over-attuned to how I feel I don't even know what feeling well feels like. So, this was maybe not the moment to read Severance. (When I mentioned to my therapist on Wednesday that I was reading a post-apocalyptic book about a deadly fever, she said, "You're reading this why?" All I could tell her was that I would be done in a day or two.) I will say, there was a reason I kept reading it: It's good. But maybe give it a year or so.