Stacking Your Shelves

Highly recommended - a browse through the comments on this Guardian "culture vulture" blog, which brightened up my Friday afternoon, about the different approaches to ordering your books - do you do it by chronology, subject, size, colour, or some other system?

One the one had were the Nick Hornby types who had some intricate and carefully maintained ordering system. On the other were those who thought that "books are for reading" and that arranging them in a special way is either anal or pretentious. The split of comments was about two-thirds / one third between the two groups.

The best comments made me cry with laughter. An example of the compulsive orderer:

"Initially, by broad subject area: academic books (which tend to be in my office); literature; politics; current events; music; film; biography; and so on.

Now, within those categories they are alphabetically by author and chronologically within that for academic books and literature; and by subject matter for the other categories, though alphabetically by author within that category, and if there is more than one book by an author on a given topic, chronologically of course.

I should also mention that I simply cannot bear for a book to have broken spine -- it makes reading them a careful matter.

Writing this down I realise that I may need help."

And here is the best response from the anti types:

"I organise my books according to how easily I can use them to bludgeon and brain damage people who honestly give a shit about how their books are organised. Too large and the books are too heavy to lift, and the pretentious twats get away. Too light, and insufficient damage is inflicted, and the vacuous morons barely feel it through their dense three-inch thick philistine skulls. The optimum size is a 300 page hardback and for this reason I keep these books nearest to hand. I only wish more writers would consider writing books of this size and shape. Otherwise the nob-ends who think that fiction has ANYTHING to do with how it sits on a shelf will win, and we, the mindlessly violent minority, will lose."

This, however, took the cake:

"I don't shelve books. I eat them. I'm a big book eater. I've been eating books since I was about four. I know it was four because my parents knew about it before I started school and had to warn them. They wrote a letter. In fact they wrote two - I ate the first one. Correspondence is to me what a packet of crisps is to you. I don't like the internet, because you can't eat it. A lot of you people seem to be complaining about a surplus of books. I can help. Seriously I can. Just let me live in your attic or something. Send them up six at a time. I can get through six in an evening. I wouldn't need anything else, just plenty of water and some good toothpicks. You probably don't believe me, but truth is stranger than fiction. Dickens said that. I think a lot of people say it. Dickens doesn't taste so great. Tolstoy said Dickens was a garrulous writer, which means fatty as far as I'm concerned. I wonder if Tolstoy ever ate Dickens? Dickens could have done with eating Tolstoy for sure. I'd better go, I have something on the stove."

Aside from the sore ribs, all this left me with a warm, fuzzy sensation which I think is called fellow feeling. It's nice to know there are this many people out there who are vaguely unhinged in ways you can understand and emapthize with.

For the record, I've long had this fantasy of having a comprehensive library of books, CDs, magazines, backed-up computer files and reference material, all arranged in a rational and integrated manner. But my life so far has been too transient to ever support this, and so I've tended to take the "read and pass on" approach. I own hardly any of the books which I've most enjoyed or which have been most important to me - almost all of these I have either borrowed, got out of the library, or picked up travelling and then passed on.

It's almost like these two tendencies reflect two sides to my personality - on the one hand the introverted, fraidy cat, Cancerian hoarder; on the other, the more reckless, happy-go-lucky, "life is for living" type. I suspect that this second tendency is the weaker, and that at some subconscious level there's a resistance to having a well-stocked, orderly bookshelf, because when this happens, it means the introverted Cancerian has won.

Books and Inspiration

If you're looking for an internet portal that helps you tap into the zeitgeist (at least with an American, broadly liberal flavour), Slate is a good place to start. There's scholarly argument, polemic and media commentary. You get both contributions to, and analysis of, the current debates.

Yesterday they began a feature series on "How to Save the American University", getting a range of prominent academics to put forward their views on what students should be learning and how they should learn it. The articles are definitely worth a read if you're at all interested in these questions.

I like Steven Pinker's idea that science teaching should be organized by "content rather than discipline: the physical universe, rather than physics or astronomy or chemistry; living things, rather than biology; the human mind, rather than psychology or neuroscience".

It's only belatedly that I've become interested in scientific topics, as I've come to see their interconnectedness and relationship to things that are meaningful to me. Maths and science were never going to be my strong points, but I think I could have got more engaged at a younger age if they had been made part of a narrative the way Pinker suggests.

As it was, when there was no answer to *why* a parallel circuit behaved differently from a series circuit, or what the implications of radioactive decay were, I just glazed over and tried not to breath too much of the lab's ammonia fumes.

Elsewhere, I agree with K. Anthony Appiah's suggestion it wouldn't be a bad idea for humanities majors to learn some stats, and am intrigued by Alison Gopnik's proposal of a revolution in learning practice.

However, the best thing in this series so far is a piece on "My First Literary Crush", with a raft of noteworthies describing the book which most changed their life in college. Frighteningly worthy, most of them.

Reading this made me wonder what book most inspired me in my university years, and after some thought I'm afraid to say--walking cliche that it makes me--I couldn't go past On the Road. As with about a million other wannabe bohemian college kids, it made me jump out of my seat, punch my fist into my hand and shout "yes!".

I guess that explains why the people featured here followed a sensible, structured, pathway into their current careers as writers, editors and journalists, while I raced off to work in carnivals in Canada and wind up penniless in Guatemala, convinced I just had to Know Time, then write it all down on one 36-foot long piece of paper.

Searching for something less cliched, the book which first made me appreciate journalistic non-fiction as a literary form was Vincent Bugliosi's account of the Manson family murders, investigation and trial. Not by any means a great work, I suppose, but I was gripped by the way that individual facts pieced together to form the narrative, and how the deadpan retelling of the events and characters' back stories created a picture of late-1960s California, paradoxically more vivid for the authorial restraint.

It seems that at university I mostly read the compulsory stuff, drank beer and goofed off. I would do better on the "books that influenced my life" thread if I were allowed to include the times before and after formal study. And perhaps in another post I will.

Categories: education, university, books