I just got the last of my folks' stuff that I'd decided to keep. This last batch happened to be books (and a strong box), so none of it was breakable. Oddly, the boxes all arrived in fine shape, as though they were too heavy to toss around. Maybe that's the secret of having your packages treated well: put a couple of bricks in them if they're too light, so they don't get passed like a basketball in the Final Four game.
Anyway, as I was surveying what I'd unpacked, I started thinking about overlapping libraries because of a conversation I had with Dr. Em. Though we're both big readers and also like science fiction, very few of our books overlap. And though Jen and I have some serous overlap in our libraries, especially in fiction, many of the books she thinks are great and recommends to me, fail to move me, and vice versa. Now you'd think that I'd have either some serious overlap with the people I grew up with and learned to love books from, or that they would have a lot of books that I'd want, but that turns out not to be the case.
What's really interesting about this circumstance, at least to me, is how books speak to different people in different voices, and even at different times, calling to each reader's obsessions, no matter what the author intended in crafting the book (yeah, yeah, old Reader Response news, I know). Once when my mom was visiting, I gave her Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow to read because I thought it was such a great story about the utter failure of words to communicate intent, emotion, or meaning without shared assumptions (and sometimes even then). What she saw in it was the sneaky insidiousness of the Jesuits setting off to convert everyone. We were talking at cross purposes about two different books inside the same cover—highly ironic, given what I'd gotten out of the book. But that should have tipped me off for what I found when I had to go through their books.
My folks had a home library of about 500 books, hard- and softcover, trade paperback and pocket books. They collected books for what was in them, not for what their value as either objects or collectors items. Dad and I had always shared science fiction books with each other, and later on, when I got interested in them, Mom and I shared mysteries, but those were either paperbacks we mailed back and forth and then gave away, or library books. When I went off to college, Mom got interested in some of the history I was learning, so our libraries started to overlap there, especially in church history and odd little corners of medievalism, and in some of the women's fiction I'd rediscovered thanks to Virago. Eventually, due to space limitations, they started to rely more heavily on the local libraries and paperback exchanges, like the one at the Greenbush post office. When it came time to clean out their shelves, there turned out to be very little I wanted.
What I sent home was less than a shelfful, some of it sentimental keeps (like Mom's copy of the Harper edition of The Family Mark Twain, which was my first exposure to him), some of it because it interested me (Winston Churchill as I Knew Him by Violet Bonham Carter, which I suspect has amusing anecdotes in it), some of them because they're nicer editions of books I already own (The Folio Society editions of Animal Farm, The Best of Dorothy Parker and The Wit of Oscar Wilde and the Greek Myths). And there's Norman Davies Europe: A History, which I've been coveting since it came out; Christopher Hibbert's Cities and Civilization, which might be useful for a book I'm contemplating; and John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope.
Then there's all the odd medieval stuff: a lovely if out-of-date (in scholarly terms) Folio Society boxed set of hoary European dons: Geoffrey Barraclough's The Crucible of the Middle Ages, H. St. L.B. Moss's The Birth of the Middle Ages, R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, John H. Mundy's The High Middle Ages, and Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (known as The Autumn of the Middle Ages in its more recent and better translation); Zoe Oldenbourg's Massacre at Montsegur; Richard Gough's History of Myddle; and a little book called Jewish Legends of the Middle Ages, translated by Claud Field. Sadly, I think Mom collected a lot of the medieval Folio Society books for me to have when she was gone, although there are stickies in a couple of them, on pages discussing divisions of clergy and laity and the introduction of celibacy in the early church—areas of interest that we shared.
But that's all. The rest of their books—Dads WWII, British Empire and American West histories, and spy fiction, Mom's mysteries and fiction—I gave to the local library, boxes and boxes of it, or in the case of all the Time-Life sets, will sell at auction along with Mom's opera and classical LPs, which are legion. It just strikes me as strange that I should have had so little in common with my folks, literarily, in the end.
I learned to read in that house, from those two people, but much of what I read while I lived in that house is gone now. There was a set of fairy tale books that I'd give my right arm to find again, that contained lovely color plates and was, I think, mostly Norwegian fairy tales, but it also had Norse folklore in it, with stories about Odin and Thor and Loki and Freya, that first got me interested in mythology. I think those were the first books I loved, and like most things, I love them more because they're gone.
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