Booksgiving

Thoughts on sifting through twelve years of books.

Thanksgiving this last week in America is such a special bundle of days! 

I love nothing more than staying around San Francisco, the tempo in the streets mellowing to stand still by Wednesday evening.

Morning temperatures are crisp and the surf conditions add to the ritual, an unfailing late November consistency under big blue skies :)

With a first move in twelve years two weeks away, I kicked off the Thanksgiving days with an open house invitation to mulled wine and ‘Booksgiving’…for the few international friends lurking in town sans famille…

These last weeks - and earlier in career pause - have seen hours and hours - and hours - squandered to gazing across shelves and shelves and boxes and boxes of books.

A finger hovering over different titles, willing up the confidence to play God and executioner. To decide “Yes You! But God no, not You!” with more than two hundred hard copy spines gathered over twelve years…(Let’s blame the one-click era?…and too the ‘beautiful retail’ counter-attack that we’re seeing in great bookstores).

So, ‘Booksgiving’ was a fun way to ask friends to enjoy taking a bundle of books each, across history and politics (a little), business (a lot) and “how to” (a lot), exercise science (plenty) and natural world and environment (a lot).

And then there’s the decades old cherished ‘surf and ocean’ long row, a collection in itself.

As my finger has scanned across the rows and rows, all kinds of thoughts - and snapshot memories - would bubble up…

Of exactly where I was standing in an Edinburgh apartment as I unwrapped a birthday gift from my Grenoble flatmate in the late nineties, in bright yellow: The F-Word: The Complete History of the Word In All Its Robust and Various Uses!

Of the Christmas morning in Donegal (2015, or ‘16?) I opened Mum’s gift of Nigella Lawson’s At My Table.

And standing outside the Ansel Adams gallery in Yosemite in 2013 when Mum emerged with a copy of Meditations of John Muir as a gift. 

And seeing the quirky cover of Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist time-capsuled me back to late 2001, a New York bookshop, there with an inspiring boss and mentor from early career days - now a dear friend. Kristian and I had just visited the World Trade Centre Towers disaster site together (then still a shocking pile of dust-stirring rubble), and he’d taken me to my first yoga class (a few years before the Welsh rugby team started yoga in off-season…). And I’d taken reams and reams of photos, then developed in black and white, of his beloved and grieving city. Tibor is a beautiful memoir and business book - a unique retro- aesthetic too - of an influential graphic designer reflecting on the ills of consumerism observed through his career.

Others I don’t even really remember buying - like Why Buddhism is True and Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, and On Knowing: Essays For The Left Hand. I guess falling victim to Amazon’s one-click function, and the pink candy floss of some curious moment that I had to lick - I mean click - perhaps gazing out of a pandemic window on Webster Street in Spring 2020?

So many of these books might always be useful, in reference, but there’s no need for me to be their reference host forever. I’ll tax myself with a future Kindle version repurchase if I really notice I’ve really missed it, in this day of quick reference on the internet. Others are harder choices to decide to cull.

Perhaps because they are deeper ‘totems’ of who we are in some way. Or who we want to be, just a little more. Some hazy dream of the past that lingers into today’s identity, or some idea that could be a real signpost to our future.

Like my interest in exercise science, going back to a brilliant track coach as a teenager, as observed in the quirky title Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia intoxicating Sunday afternoon reading on the origins of our language labels for anatomy, both formal and biological, and slang too.

And like How to Listen to Jazz, random pages of which will always remind me to turn off podcasts and get back to the most inspiring of music forms and thoughts (again) of one day growing old and slowing to standstill in playing the saxophone all day long on some hectic street corner in the sun :)

Or Christopher Alexander’s architectural philosophy bible A Pattern Language - really a treatise on human nature reacting to the built environment and how we design the spaces around us.

Or Dad’s On Human Farm, the most ‘first-hand’ inspiration I have to just keep going in writing, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph…weaving purpose and life experience into words. Its spine a daily reminder to be useful in all of our days, and to fight for what you believe in.

Some totems carry additional weight in being part of a collection, like the Surfing and Ocean literature shelf :) A cornerstone to this is a cherished copy of Under The Sea Wind - that I stumbled on in a second-hand bookstore in San Francisco one foggy Saturday morning after an eerie surf. It’s a 1952 Second Edition of the iconic environmental writer Rachel Carson, written before the ecology writing cornerstone Silent Spring (1962), that I first read about preparing for my Environmental Management Masters in 2003. Carson was renowned for her stunningly beautiful descriptions of the dead ponds and rivers observed from industrial pollution in the 1960s that made the book a cornerstone of the early environmental movement.

Chatting with a wise Canadian Aunt this weekend - about to go through the courage of her own move after a couple of decades on Vancouver Island, and losing her husband Uncle John earlier this year - I valued hearing Margaret’s own somewhat Zen philosophy, along the lines:

“There may be a handful that you will want to read again, and should be kept. The rest deserve to be passed on, to live on for somebody else.” 

As for those unread titles, I have to be strict (except where it’s painful?) to take on Marie Kondo’s advice, in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (a gift now gifted on to a friend during the Booksgiving party)…

“If you missed your chance to read a particular book, this is your chance to let it go. You may have wanted to read it when you bought it, but if you haven’t read it by now, the book’s purpose was to teach you that you didn’t need it.”

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The hours of shelf reflection had me thinking how there is a fine, and tricky line between collecting, and hoarding. And we get reminded of this with every house or apartment move.

Would it be fair to suggest that a useful rule of thumb defining the difference between a collection and a hoard, is that the collection has a real meaning and theme linking every item on a carefully curated shelf. And a hoard is more a gathering ‘pile of the past’, the clinging and holding on that is so easy to fall into (if estate sales are an indicator to go by…)?

Ruing these hours of career pause time lost to heavy-soled indecision, ruminating on the past, I’m resolved to stay lighter in the future. (Well…except for the day I have to pull myself up into the attic of my London apartment to open up a box of some two hundred CDs…)

Time slips through our fingers.

And, moving house is a once-in-a-while caveat emptor, a ‘buyer beware’ to the timeless wisdom of the movie Fight Club’s protagonist Tyler Durden in the opening scenes…

“The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.”

There’s no need to be losing everything here, but it feels great to be shedding a lot.

All assured by the grand lesson of my last big move, from London to San Francisco in 2012, and hours and hours going in and out of a storage locker culling the box volume down to size. Just a few months later I couldn’t remember one single thing from all that I gave away…

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*I enjoyed hearing of a minimalist young CEO (Loom), who apart from a small Hall of Fame collection of beloved titles, per Marie Kondo’s rule of thumb, limits himself to only having the next book he will read. A one in, one out strategy, I guess…