When I moved from Atlanta to New York a couple of months ago, I had to decide which belongings I could take with me to my new tiny furnished studio apartment and which I had to leave behind in a storage unit. Obviously, my furniture had to stay, plus most of the china and kitchenware, winter clothes, and knick-knacks. The really valuable - rather, invaluable - items like family Bibles and photo albums I left in Kate's charge (not in storage, thank you).Looking around my many shelves of double- and triple-shelved books, I had to make a decision about which books to store (most of them) and which to take as comfortable old friends. I limited myself to one medium-sized box - though I admit I spilled over to half of another box. As I made my choices, I could almost hear the other books crying out, "What! You're not taking me?" Sorry, old friends. I promise to make it up to you someday.
Well, here's what I chose:
- The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
- Teller of Tales by Daniel Stashower
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
- An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
- Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Line of the Sun by Judith Ortiz Cofer
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- The March by E.L. Doctorow
- The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything, both by Simon Winchester
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
- The Ponder Heart by Eurdora Welty
- Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
- Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgsen Burnett
- Inferno by Dante
- Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
- Abraham Lincoln Trilogy by Carl Sandburg
- Marley and Me by John Grogan
- Forever by Pete Hamill
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- To Make Men Free and No Greater Courage by Richard Croker
- Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
- Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
- Miss Piggle-Wiggle Treasury by Betty MacDonald
- Pastoralia by George Saunders
- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
- Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
- The Fall of a Sparrow by Robert Hellenga
- City Lights Pocket Poetry Anthology (ed. Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
- 1914 and 1915, both by Lyn MacDonald
- The First World War by John Keegan
- Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
- The First World War by Hew Strachan
- The Great War: Myth and Memory by Dan Todman
- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
- A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot
- Regeneration by Pat Barker
So, which of your beloved volumes would holler "Take me along!"?
5 comments:
Hm. I'd take all my Tolkien, Harry Potter, Narnia, the first 3 Anne of Greene Gables. I'd take all the Jane Austen, and some of the Du Maurier (Rebecca and House on the Strand, I'd say). I'd probably take Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Then I'd start going through the Stephen King to see what I could fit. Probably It, The Stand, and Rose Madder for sure. Oh, and Jasper Fforde. All the Thursday Next. And then...
You know what, forget it. I just wouldn't move. ;)
Yeah - I'm trying not to think of all those screaming little voices inside the 57 boxes of books in the storage unit. Sigh.
I've had a number of thorough book 'purges' through the years, and those that stay with me are the collections, rather than works of great literature. So, I have many Agatha Christies, Peanuts and all the 'Cat Who...' books by Lilian Jackson Braun. My thinking is that it's easy to buy a copy of Jane Eyre, or pick it up from the library, but as soon as I have more than, say, three from the same author/series, that makes me a collector!
Having said that, I do have some books that have survived the frequent culling, including: It by Stephen King; Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; The One Hundred and One Dalmations by Dodie Smith; The Alienist by Caleb Carr.
Good point, Jo, and as you can tell from the list, I didn't bring many "classics." The ones I brought along have special meaning to me - not only the book, but how I came to own it (be it gift or purchase from an unusual location, etc.). Sadly, I did leave all my Agathas behind (and they were yelling mightily, I tell you!).
atonement.. i love that book :)..
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