“My house has more books in it than it has cups, or plates, or forks and spoons, or ornaments, or pictures, or towels and sheets, or even clothes.”
That’s the opening sentence in a piece in the “Arts & Books” section of the December 2 print edition of The Globe and Mail, and, as you might suppose, it had your librarians hooked. The essayist, Dawn Promislow, who has had published numerous short stories, poems, and, just last year, a first novel [Wan], continued: “I feel that living with many books around is the only way to live. I exaggerate—but not really.”
In her “Part of the furniture,” as the piece is headed, she reported, “Every room in my house, except for the bathroom, has books in it. Some of the bookshelves are makeshift and plain—a couple were castoffs found on the curb—but two of them are beautiful and dark wood, and old. I would love more bookshelves, and beautiful ones, but I hardly have room.”
Further along, she owns up to this, that she has “never thrown away a book…. Although I’ve lent books, I’ve never given a book away. Or sold one. This is quite true. I am unable to get rid of a book. […] Looking at my books, looking through my books, is never a waste of time because I find it deeply comforting. And here we come to the crux of the matter: comforting.” When she casts her eyes over her crush of books, she feels “comforted and energized at the same time. I think it is because of books’ inexhaustibility. I will never be bored, because I always have a book to pick up.”
After all, “I do believe that books carry everything, by which I mean, they carry our heritage, they carry our ideas, they carry who we are. They are us. This is why I cannot get rid of a book, because it feels like a death to get rid of a book. I know and I realize that these feelings I have verge on the irrational, but I own them—the feelings; the books.”
In her paean, she broaches, “There are, here and there on my shelves, books…[that] glint with the allure of things mysterious, yet deeply familiar.” That allurement had us thinking about the collection of books in the SSUC Library, all of them having to do with religion-writ-large: mysterious, yet deeply familiar. And maybe especially about the 130-or-so that, over the last five years, have been singled out for preview/review under the heading, “Featured Book”.
“[T]his is part of having bookshelves of books, isn’t it,” Ms. Promislow wondered, “that one feels compelled to recommend books to other people; compelled to press upon other people books one has loved. In this way books are about love, about reaching the hearts of other people, and telling them something—and love always comes into that, doesn’t it?”
Ken Fredrick
