I’ve recently been downsizing again - a process that involves just as much throwing away as it does cramming more and more stuff into a smaller and smaller space. And the chucking out that’s upset most of my friends is the fact that I’ve finally got rid of a third of my collection of books.
“Thrown out your books!” say my friends, horrified. “But you can’t throw away books!” Their reaction is as shocked as if I’d tossed remnants of Christ’s very bones into the bin, or sold my grandchildren to white slavers, or concreted over my front garden to convert it into a parking space.
By why not? Having written fifteen of the damn things, I think I’m in a better position than most to be able to put books into their proper place in the scheme of things. And I’m constantly surprised to find how books are still revered as if they were one-off medieval manuscripts – rather than mass-produced in their thousands and sold in supermarkets like Tescos.
It’s not as if any of the books I chucked were rare. They were only seedy old paperbacks with titles like “Twenty Ways to a Flatter Tummy” “The Art of Prayer”, the second copy of Anna Karenina I’d found on my shelves and the unreadable Angela’s Ashes (along with a lot of other contemporary fiction my friends had given me insisting, wrongly, that it was “marvellous”). I did throw away a couple of Lawrence Durrells, too, but they were unreadable, and as for Iris Murdoch – spare me.
And yet the reverence continues. “I just love books!” a friend exclaimed the other day. “Any book! I love their smell, I love their appearance – they make so much different to a room, make it feel lived-in - I just love the feel of the things in my hand!”
“I just love turning over the pages!” said another. “And the smell of old books – you know they used a different glue for the bindings in the old days, which gives old books their distinctive aroma,” added another, sentimentally. “And library books! Do you remember their smell?” added another, as if she were starving in the desert and salivating over the idea of cassoulet.. “And their feel!” added another, going into raptures. “Their fat fluffy pages, thickened by constant reading!”
They start banging on, again like gourmets discussing the merits of home-made bread over the sliced variety, about the covers. “They have to be hard,” said one. “Oh, yes, nothing like a good hardback,” agreed his friend. “Paperbacks just aren’t the same. And remember those old embossed ones we used to have in our youths?”
I don’t get it. The pleasure I get from books is not as objects in themselves – because, like people, they can be brilliant, mediocre or utter tosh – but what happens to you as you read them. Reading is a wonderfully intimate experience, something that happens between you and the writer and, what’s so fascinating, when he’s not even there. It’s rather like sex, something completely private and peculiar.
But while my book-loving friends would despise me if I drooled on about a boyfriend’s tight buttocks, his smell, his sparkling teeth, and his seductive drawl, feeling that I should, instead, be raving about the inner man, his soul and his generous and kindly personality, they’re quite happy to objectivise books.
I remember meeting someone who’d interviewed some author, and he spoke admiringly about the way the man could barely open the door for the piles of books in his flat. And no, they weren’t all by him, either. But, to me, they were not a sign of his brilliance but, rather, evidence of a desire for an intellectual comfort blanket or, worse, a status symbol. And I wondered how many books someone like the great Nabokov (none of his books thrown away) had had in his small hotel suite in Switzerland at the end of his life. Not many, I’ll bet.
I put this obsession with books partly down to Hitler and his book burning. But just because some books are worth preserving doesn’t mean they all are. There are some real stinkers around. In fact I think I’ll just check over my shelves and see if there are any more that I can weed out.
I can’t help feeling it’s no coincidence that the new e-book on which one can store thousands of words without the clutter of the actual objects, is named “kindle.” Perhaps I’ll start a bonfire myself. I’ve certainly got enough books to start a blaze.