Tag: bookshelf

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When books create movies in our minds

Have you ever had this happen to you – where a story is so alive in your imagination that you’re sure you must have seen it with your own eyes?

Have you ever had this happen to you – where a story is so alive in your imagination that you’re sure you must have seen it with your own eyes or at the movies? I’ll get to the movies in our minds in a minute. But first:

Sometimes, I like to sit on my sofa and look at my books. Especially when I’ve just finished a book and don’t know what I want to read next. Conveniently, my main bookshelf* is directly across from my favorite reading spot. It’s my favorite interior view. Obviously.

Sitting there in my favorite spot, I think about all the places my books have taken me, all the thoughts they’ve inspired me to think, all the questions they’ve invited me to ask. I think about the conversations I’ve had with friends about these books. I think about how many people have read the same book, all around the world. It’s a lovely, cozy feeling.

Today, I was looking at my bookshelves with a critical eye. By this, I mean with an eye toward figuring out where the heck I’m going to put all the books I brought back from the book sale I went to this morning. Let’s not talk numbers. It’s so vulgar.

As I’m strategically moving books around – sort of like those puzzles where you have to maneuver squares to fit a certain pattern – I stumble on a 1920s bundle: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Nella Larson’s Passing. During a two-week period a few years ago, I read these three novels in succession. My goal in doing so was to experience that period through a range of viewpoints.

A scene of 1920s-ish New York came into my mind as I looked at these books: an African-American woman standing at an intersection with her young son. I remember this about the scene: They’ve walked down from Harlem into a white neighborhood, and the woman is afraid, and she takes her son’s hand.

Sure it was from a movie, I combed my memory for the film’s name. Then I realized something: It wasn’t a scene from a movie at all. It was a scene from Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. The scene lives in my memory in such intense, vivid detail that I was sure I had seen it with my eyes. But I hadn’t. I’d conjured it in my imagination because of Gyasi’s words and the story they weave and the intensity of the emotion.

Have you ever had that happen to you – where a story is so alive in your imagination that you’re sure you must have seen it with your own eyes?

*By “main bookshelf,” I mean the most organized (term used loosely) bookshelf, the one where I still have a 50 percent chance of actually finding a book I’m looking for.

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My overstuffed shelfies are driving me mad

Trying to find a specific title on my shelfies is like trying to find the Rosetta Stone, without the benefit of Napoleon’s army.

Recently, I was looking for a book I knew, with absolute certainty, lived somewhere on my shelfies. The *real* ones. The ones that hold my paper books.

So many pretty books on my shelfies. Now if only I could find them.
Here is another beauty.

Though I am a devoted e-reader (and devoted to my e-reader), I love paper books, especially hardcover paper books. Hardcovers have weight and heft. They have physical presence. They feel friendly in my hand. They can be art objects in themselves. Here, the first titles that come to mind are The Enchanted Wanderer: And Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.

This is one reason I have so much trouble getting rid of paper books, even the ones I probably won’t reread, or (ahem) read for the first time. It’s their beauty and sense of possibility. Continue reading “My overstuffed shelfies are driving me mad”