Heavy on the sci-fi books this week to get a total of 58 leaving home
Book Purge Twenty-three — November 27th 2016
The struggle to find books to purge gets more intense. This week I have returned to the sci-fi shelves to find some likely candidates. Second visits to shelves mean I have to start thinking beyond books I quite like to own and see them as books I may read again or refer to for some reason or another.
The sci-fi books I have piled up here fall into neither category, I’m afraid, so they must go. If the aim remains to have shelves in which I can finally see all the books without having to move a front row to access those at the back, there is no longer room for the nice-to-haves.
There’s a le Carré in there, too, because I’ve decided to keep only a few of his novels and I didn’t consider The Russia House one of the top rank. I’ve had the Gary Larson a long time and repeated viewing of the cartoons is now delivering diminishing returns.
Some duplicates here but also a decision — hard, in some cases, — that in a toss up with other books, these are books that can go based on the usual criteria:
1. Will I read it again? 2. Will I need to refer to it? 3. Do I want to keep it because I think it makes my shelves look good?
I remember the first time I read Earthly Powers and was blown away by the exuberance of the prose and the iconoclasm of the subject matter. Burgess could be a bit of an arse and a complete egotist but he could also write some great books. But still…..time is too short to think of reading it again.
Martin Amis was one of my favourite writers and I would buy everything he published., often in hardback. That infatuation has waned over the years and I have switched my allegiance to Ian McEwan instead.
Where once I thought McEwan slight and less powerful than Amis, now I find I admire his writing more and more. It seems to me that where Amis has sort of found himself stuck in a furrow he once ploughed so admirably, McEwan has continues to develop. I may be wrong but these are my shelves: the McEwans stay and the Amises — barring a few early gems — leave.
As I go through this process, I’m discovering that I’m actually missing books. Now, as I struggle to find books to purge, it may appear rather weird to complain that I have fewer books than I thought. Not perhaps in overall number but certainly in terms of particular books. Today, for instance, I realised that my copies of the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake are nowhere to be found.
When I was posted to Singapore in the early 1990s, my house was packed up and all my books went into storage. On my return five years later I always felt fewer boxes arrived than I had sent to the storage place. It was a time of upheaval so it was not something I could reliably check. And then many of the books went into the attic. So it is only now — almost two decades later — that I’m finding I have lost long ago books I thought were safely packed away upstairs.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think I would read Peake again now, however much I remember the character of Steerpike and great library fire that shocked me to the core when I read it first many years ago. That library fire ranked with the loss of the great library in Alexandria in my imagination.
And yet here I am dismantling a library of my own. I suspect some of the books in the earlier destroyed collections were of a more serious nature than many of my own volumes.
58 books this week. Finding new victims this week is going to be a struggle.
