By Anthony Domestico - December 06, 2011
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
In “Unpacking My Library,’’ Leah Price includes photographs of the personal libraries of the 13 contemporary writers she interviews, including Junot Díaz’s (above). Library: Writers and Their Books,’’ “To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self.’’
This idea - that one’s authentic self is revealed in the construction of a library - explains why we so carefully examine the bookshelves of potential friends or romantic partners. A quick scan of someone’s library shows so much: They’re a “Jane Eyre’’ or a “Wuthering Heights’’ person; they love graphic novels or Penguin Classics; they enjoy world history or personal memoir. There’s something deeply personal, even intimate, about what and how one reads, so much so that we feel embarrassed when we are caught staring uninvited at someone else’s books.
In “Unpacking My Library,’’ Price, a Harvard English professor and a scholar of book history, gives us access to the personal libraries of 13 contemporary writers, ranging from the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel to the American man of letters Edmund White. Price asks each writer a series of questions: When did you start buying books? What organizational principles (if any) undergird your personal library? Do you keep some books private? Are you willing to lend books to friends?
These questions yield fascinating answers. The novelist Junot Díaz, for instance, hates the idea of keeping any book private: “It means no one will ever randomly pick it up and have a conversation with you about it.’’ New Yorker critic James Wood resists the urge to view the book as a sacred artifact; he marks books up, dog-ears them, drops them in the tub, writes to-do lists and telephone numbers in the margins. For Wood, books are tools of living, and should be treated as such.
This idea - that one’s authentic self is revealed in the construction of a library - explains why we so carefully examine the bookshelves of potential friends or romantic partners. A quick scan of someone’s library shows so much: They’re a “Jane Eyre’’ or a “Wuthering Heights’’ person; they love graphic novels or Penguin Classics; they enjoy world history or personal memoir. There’s something deeply personal, even intimate, about what and how one reads, so much so that we feel embarrassed when we are caught staring uninvited at someone else’s books.
In “Unpacking My Library,’’ Price, a Harvard English professor and a scholar of book history, gives us access to the personal libraries of 13 contemporary writers, ranging from the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel to the American man of letters Edmund White. Price asks each writer a series of questions: When did you start buying books? What organizational principles (if any) undergird your personal library? Do you keep some books private? Are you willing to lend books to friends?
These questions yield fascinating answers. The novelist Junot Díaz, for instance, hates the idea of keeping any book private: “It means no one will ever randomly pick it up and have a conversation with you about it.’’ New Yorker critic James Wood resists the urge to view the book as a sacred artifact; he marks books up, dog-ears them, drops them in the tub, writes to-do lists and telephone numbers in the margins. For Wood, books are tools of living, and should be treated as such.
The real delights of “Unpacking My Library,’’ however, are not the interviews, but the images. The book provides several high-quality photographs of each writer’s library. It’s one thing to hear a writer describe his or her books; it’s another to see these books in their actual habitat, to see, for instance, which edition of “Middlemarch’’ Rebecca Goldstein owns (it’s the Norton), or what sits on top of “The Canterbury Tales’’ on Stephen Carter’s bookshelf (it’s Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth’’), or where Díaz keeps his extensive collection of sci-fi (in the kitchen).
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