You can tell a lot about a person by the books she keeps on her shelf. In fact, the dusty volumes forgotten on the bottom shelves, or crammed behind the more recent reads, tell a story of hopes and hobbies, interests and itineraries, and trace the development of her academic history. Cleaning my six-foot-tall bookshelf today was a dust-bunny-escorted walk down memory lane.
The bottom shelf revealed my love of the creative arts. Scripts, song books, even class notes from college stood next binders full of choral sheet music, Sunset magazine gardening books, and flower arranging ideas. Dusting off the song books, I remembered the intense concentration I used to give to learning my favorite Broadway musicals word for word and note for note. The collections of sheet music from my concert choir days seemed timeless, in contrast to the binder of clippings with ideas for flower arranging - a fledgling attempt at creating a portfolio to launch a creative side business when I was unfulfilled in my day job. Now, not only have I supplied floral arrangements for several weddings and built a photo portfolio to prove it, but I have more need for creativity in my job and in my life than I have energy to fulfill!
There were rows upon rows of the classics: Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Camus, Kafka, Poe, and just to cover it all, the multi-volume Norton's Anthology of English Literature, Selected Works of Mark Twain, a compilation of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and The Hemingway Reader. There were the requisite college lit course readings that became beloved to me as they opened my eyes to new viewpoints and literary styles. In front of those sat the modern, popular fiction, more recently collected and read. The Poisonwood Bible, Cold Mountain, The Reader, Kite Runner - mostly half-read and relegated to the shelf with good intentions for another time. Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and Isabel Allende spread their feminine, and feminist, influence amongst Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Crane, and Salinger. African Literature mingled its colorful tales with the heat of the Latin magical realists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Poetry and drama were sprinkled in a healthy dose, too - T.S. Elliot, Shakespeare's sonnets, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill. A virtual syllabus of my college reading list. Only the treasured tomes have been preserved this long, getting moved from dorm to apartment to house, and maintaining precious real estate on an ever more crowded perch.
The books that didn't make it back onto that property after a good dusting also tell a tale. The user's manual for screenwriting software that fed my dreams just after college, a resume writing guide printed in 1994, travel books from the late 1990s, and more pretentious books on wine than I care to admit - these all surrendered their space on the shelves today.
The reference shelf took top billing, where I can easily see the dictionary, Bible, Hoyle's Book of Games, or Roberts Rules of Order if and when I ever need them.
A few precious childhood stories hide down low, behind the more respectable books. But three versions of Peter Pan as well as both the French and English translations of The Little Prince sit proudly up high. And the tallest book on the shelf had to be put back up high, on the only shelf where it fits - The Lonely Doll, the controversial but poignantly lovely photo-storybook of the little messy-haired doll and her teddy bear friends.
Six feet tall, made of wood, standing like a Buckingham Palace guard between my closet and a window, the unassuming bookshelf holds a history of my life. It may not be seen by many eyes other than mine, but now that I've skimmed the contents page again, it reminds me every time I glance at it of stories I've loved, places I've been, what I've learned, and the ideas that make me who I am.
