Stages Rearranging Books

I'm out here book buying without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable bibliophile conduct. And I am still at home buying tomes. Well, that and I desperately want A Room of One's Own to be around once the pandemic subsides. Not being able to browse their shelves really blows. And so I recently found myself running short on bookshelf space.

One thing that exacerbated the problem is that I do not read e-books. If that's your thing, go for it, I say. If you feel on top of the world with a tablet full of e-books on it that are all available at the tap of button, more power to you. It's just not for me. I enjoy the tactile quality of books, their smell, and find it much easier to go find a section to refer to or re-read by turning pages rather than scrolling.

My first step in addressing the crisis was to buy a new bookcase.

I then moved most of my music books over to it since my new podcast, Time Enough At Last (you're listening to it, aren't you?), is music-centric and I thought having all those tomes at my immediate disposal would be handy.

Now, you may say that having all those books about The Who/Pete Townshend (there's another one on the shelf below this one) is overkill. But each has their place, each sheds its own light on the subjects. Indeed, this was made apparent recently when I was listening to a podcast about The Who. In it, one of the hosts referred to the "synthesizer loops" on "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again". I found the term disingenuous, if not wrong, after having read the right most book in this photo despite what Dave Marsh wrote. You are hearing organs – as played through a synthesizer – on those songs. I mean, just because you play a guitar through a fuzz pedal, you don't say you're listening to a fuzz pedal. You still refer to the sound as being guitar.

The next step in freeing up space was the hardest. I yanked these off a shelf.

These are the Great Books of the Western World™. Unfortunately, I only have 59 out of the 60 volumes as I lent out the one with Blaise Pascal's work back in the late 90s but it was never returned. They are going to be put in boxes which will be stowed in the attic. It's not that I feel that these books are unworthy or that long dead white men have nothing to impart to the denizens of the 21^st century. Rather it's because Mortimer Adler and whoever else at the University of Chicago put the collection together decided that there would be no annotations. They felt that translations of ancient texts from 1830 needed no updating and that readers could handle Paradise Lost and Shakespeare without having any of the allusions explained or defining any words that might be unfamiliar to (then) modern readers. After all, "awful" once meant full of awe instead of bad at one point, right? The meanings of words change over time.

I can't quite dispose of these tomes yet. Maybe someday. For now, I treasure their sentimental value as they belonged to my father. They are a way to help me remember some of the good things about him.

On the other hand, I've kept these out on a shelf.

These ten volumes are the Gateway to the Great Books, a prelude to Great Books. It's a collection of shorter pieces – essays, speeches, excerpts from lengthier works, et al. Unlike its bigger sibling, the Gateway gives the reader some context and the readings are often times simpler. The tenth volume, "Philosophical Essays", is dearest to my heart. It has "TheMoral Obligation to Be Intelligent" by John Erskine and a clutch of essays by Francis Bacon. "On Friendship" was oddly consoling to me when I was a teenager who had just moved to the middle of nowhere Wisconsin and had no friends within a 300 miles radius.  "Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god," it began.

The next step was to remove a boatload of novels from a bookcase.

None of them have been read and they may end up getting shoehorned back onto a shelf if I enjoy them enough. These are mostly works of experimental/avant-garde fiction – the top two in the photo are very much indicative of the books below. I've read many such novels the past few years but rarely do I keep any of them. While I never regret having read a difficult book, precious few genuinely resonate with me on more than a surface level. So they are going to sit in front of a shelf until I start reading from those piles again.

As I was doing my rearranging, I noticed how many of the books reminded me of a particular time of my life. Here, for instance, is one of my favorite books of my boyhood.

I loved Richard Scarry! What was the worm's name? Was it Lowly? There was the story of how somebody's kid got baked into a loaf of bread. This book is my Rosebud, if you will.

When I moved to Wisconsin from Chicago, I dearly missed reading The Straight Dope every week.

I think this, the first compilation of Uncle Cecil's columns, dates back to when I was in the 7^th grade. Those of us that had copies were sure to pass it around. My friends and I had many, many laughs reading this one.

At this time we were all also reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as playing the Infocom text adventure based on them.

Sadly, I no longer have the paperbacks of the first three novels but my hardback copies of the last two books in the series as well as all of the Dirk Gently ones are all first edition and so I've been lugging them around for 30+ years.

I adore the Riverworld series although it's been many years since I've read it. Truth be told, I blundered into Philip Jose Farmer's series by getting the last book first with my decision being based mostly on the cover art. (So it goes if you are into progressive rock, I guess.)

I remember buying it while in 7^th or 8^th grade. The purchase was made at a bookstore at Six Corners in Chicago. It was a chain, I believe. Maybe a Waldenbooks. But it was the one I'd swear was on Irving Park, not the hole in the wall bookstore on Cicero. I think that was a B. Dalton.

Jumping ahead to college, I've kept most, if not all of the books for Poli Sci 4XX or whatever level it was. I took it my senior year. This was the second of a two-part examination of liberalism. By this time, the USSR had dissolved leaving liberalism as the dominant political ideology. I believe the first course, which I did not take, covered the roots of the liberalism through its manifestation in the American project. We're talking Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and Montesquieu and the Areopagitica and Jefferson and whatnot.

The second course was about modern conceptions and variations of liberalism. You've got Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman with their rather atavistic calls to embrace a variety that seems more 17^th century than 20th. Then there's Richard Rorty going post-modern. Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, etc. is a timeless look at the tensions of communitarian and individualistic impulses in American society. Required reading.

Also required reading are the books by my professor, Charles W. Anderson.

He was a wonderful instructor with a warm, avuncular demeanor. His lectures were never dry or boring for various reasons including the fact that they were peppered with references to Wisconsin. For instance, one time he was trying to relate one of our texts to Rousseau. Thusly there was talk of the general will as there is when Rousseau is the subject. "But," Prof. Anderson noted, "it's much easier to reach consensus amongst a small group of Swiss people than it would be today in a country of 300+ million. I mean, just imagine a bunch of farmers in Boscobel…".

Plus he knew most of the people whose books we were reading and so he'd tell stories of arguing with them at political scientist conventions and such. One of his most endearing qualities for me was that he was like the James Burke of political science. I was fascinated by how he could trace an idea back to its genesis and then up to the present day and the book we were reading. He'd start in ancient Athens with one of their proto-liberalistic ideas. Then we'd find ourselves in the Enlightenment with Locke and Hume putting hammer to anvil and molding a new formulation of it. Before you know it, Mill is tweaking it and then somebody like John Dewey put on what you think are the finishing touches. But wait! Rawls intervenes and throws everyone behind a veil of ignorance. And the debate continues.

I bought this book after dating a woman for a very short time who was in love with medieval Japanese history and literature. It's likely that I would never have bought a book on this subject if not for her. A neat little reminder of that time.

Lastly here are a bunch of Doctor Who books – Eighth Doctor Adventures. These are the books I talk about with my fellow DW fans on our Fiction Paradox podcast. They are not only very much alive today in my literary diet but they also remind me of the late 90s/early aughts when my roommate and I would head over to the Borders at East Towne Mall on Sunday mornings. I remember seeing those books then but never buying any. What a fool I was.

The bonus photo this time is of a couple suggested reading lists. One is from high school (left) while the other dates back to 7th or 8th grade. I'm a little behind...