I, Reader

Alexander Chee

My books have moved with me from Maine to Connecticut to San Francisco to New York, to Iowa to New York to Los Angeles to Rochester to Amherst and now to New York once again. I'm a writer, also the child of two people who were each the ones in their family to leave and move far away, and the result is a life where I've moved regularly, and paid to ship most of my books so often I'm sure I've essentially repurchased them several times over. Each time I move, my books have grown in number. Collectively, they're the autobiography of my reading life. Each time I pack and unpack them, I see The Phoenicians, a picture history book my father gave me as a child, and will never sell; the collection of Gordon Merrick paperbacks I shoplifted when I was a closeted teenager, stealing books no one would ever let me buy. The pages still retain the heat of that need, as does my copy of Joy Williams's Breaking and Entering, bought when I was a star-struck college student at the Bennington Summer Writers' Workshop 20 years ago. Each time they were all necessary, all differently necessary.

In the life of a New Yorker, a new book is a crisis the exact size of one new book. I spent three hours scrutinizing the shelves for weak links that could go to the used bookstore, projecting either into the past--When had I read this book and why?--or the future--Would I ever read this again, or even read it?--and filled three bags. I held my two mass-market paperback editions of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, bought at Church Street Books in San Francisco in 1990--one to own and one to lend--and after all this time, put the second into the bag. The one remaining now a reminder that I once had two.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 3, 2010 2:47 AM
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