Summer reading

The rain is on and off this week, and my house is disordered with books. My husband has been bringing boxes of them home from his office at the university because the roof there needs repairs and afterwards, all the staff offices are to be repainted and reassigned. A bit of a shuffle all round. He’s going to end up with fewer shelves in his new office, too, which means these books will need to find new homes in our house. I sit in my own book-stuffed office, look out at the rain and wonder where they can go. It’s a good problem to have but will take some logistical thinking.

It makes me think about a line from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking my Library.” Recently, I came across his name in a novel by Ruth Ozeki, which is another reason I’m thinking about him. Books play this game: they talk about each other, name-drop, gossip and overlap. Ozeki’s book is set in a library, and Benjamin talks about collecting books and book collectors, about book auctions and the feelings of discovery and acquisition as well as memories of the cities where he bought his books. He plays the game, too, and quotes words from Terentianus Maurus, a second-century Latin writer who wrote habent sua fata libelli – books have their own destiny. He was thinking about small books, tracts, pamphlets or poetry – libelli is the diminutive of liber where library has its roots – but Benjamin suggests the saying may have been intended as a statement about books in general. Then he extends the thought: “. . . not only books but copies of books have their fates.”

A fierce gust of wet wind hits my windowpane. I hope my husband isn’t carrying more cardboard boxes home today. Those books might have a soggy fate.

Invisible histories

I think about books I’ve carried with me on different days. The copy of Rilke’s poems that often goes hiking and Eliot’s Four Quartets with the scotch-taped spine. The fat Margaret Atwood that sat in my knitting bag for that hospital visit. The Bruggeman I reread the Fall my father died. The Russian novels I read twenty years ago, when my firstborn was new, and I was awake late into the night learning to breastfeed. All those books carry their own stories and invisible histories, too, unreadable to others but memorable to me. These books participated in my life and are also sources of life, connecting me with thinkers and storytellers who thought before. They are worth holding onto for that.

This month, the bookshops are advertising bargain beach reads and summer escapes and sure, that’s great, but there are other books that stay with us and travel with us. They don’t need to be important books; they just need to speak into our memories. When we find a book like that – or when it finds us – it makes its own space on our interior bookshelves and starts conversations with its neighbours. Whispers in the night, more summer rain on the roof.