My House is Not a Home Without Books

The books we select telegraph so much about who we are, what we aspire to, what we value and what we revere.

Photo by Joyce McCown on Unsplash

As a mother of four school-age children, I maintain discard, donate, and keep piles of clothing, housewares, and miscellany year round to stave off clutter. When in doubt, Marie Kondo's, “Does it spark joy?” mantra is my modus operandi. In preparation for our move to Japan, I was relentless, regulating all that remained after a massive purge to long-term storage and shipping the rest to Tokyo. Admittedly, I was zealous. It’s been three short years and I still miss Jack, our life-sized plastic skeleton with the black top hat, when it comes time to decorate for Halloween. But for the most part, I am happy with what little we transported overseas - with one big exception.

Bringing only a nightstand’s worth of reading material and leaving our book collection behind was a mistake. And by our book collection, I mean my book collection.* My husband’s proclivities lean toward tech gadgets. Do we own a PalmPilot (I, II and III?) and every iteration of an iPod that ever was? Why yes, yes we do. And while he will begrudgingly part ways with electronic devices that have gone on to glory, the accompanying cables and wires? They are immortal. “We don’t die, we multiply,” is their motto and they live on in a coaxial tangle of USB and power cords in an unknowable number of plastic storage containers, but I digress. 

I read to learn how to put an entire world to paper. I read to sate the desire for a good story. I read to feel and know more.

The books we select telegraph so much about who we are, what we aspire to, what we value and what we revere. Like body language that contradicts spoken word, browsing a bookshelf can provide a fairly accurate (if incomplete) read of its curator. The books that adorn my shelves inspire and illuminate; provide comfort even. For example, though she and I do not share the same faith, I treasure the white, leather bound Bible my grandmother gave me when I was a child. Books also serve as decor. Though I do not organize my shelves with ROYGBIV in mind, I find brightly colored spines, distinctive fonts, even great contrasts in size like Maurice Sendak’s tiny nutshell library placed beside a relatively oversized book like Bisa Butler: Portraits a visual pleasure.

Clearly I don’t need incentivizing to acquire books so I began the joyful task of replenishing my shelves in earnest. I kept tsundoku, the Japanese term for collecting books with little to no regard for intent to read them all, as my guiding principle. I sought out books I was curious about like “Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murata, a slim novel that examines the societal pressure to conform from the view point of someone who feels that the only place she fits in is at her dead-end job. I picked up “A Manual for Cleaning Women” by Lucia Berlin, an excellent collection of short stories from a writer who it seems got her flowers and accolades only after her death in 2004. I ended up with quite a few books that I really wanted to like but just couldn’t get into like Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic dystopian novel “Station Eleven.” (Maybe I’ll revisit it again one day. I was intrigued by the few HBO Max series episodes based on the book that I watched.) And finally, I bought tried and true favorites including an exquisite edition of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

I think I was 12 the first time I read Angelou’s autobiography and I remember making multiple trips to the library to complete all seven of the books in the series. However, rereading it decades later, with motherhood and life experience under my belt, it is as if I never read it all. There is no way 12-year-old me could have fully appreciated the brilliance of her writing, nor could I have truly comprehended the cruelty of the world she described.

It got me thinking about some of the books I was assigned in late elementary and early middle school. Titles such as “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about a single day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp; “Death Be Not Proud” by John Gunther, a memoir about a teenager with a terminal brain tumor and “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank, written when the author was not much older than myself at the time of my initial reading, and who died in a concentration camp. Each of these books, including Angelou’s, examine cruelty, terror and atrocity as well as human kindness, love and the fragility of life. A great portion of the content went right over my head as a child. For what then did I know of death? What then did I know of life?

Since the move to Tokyo, each of these books is again in my possession and I am eager to revisit them, to gain new insight and glean from them more complex meaning. With an eye to the craft of writing, I read to learn how to put an entire world to paper. I read to sate the desire for a good story. I read to feel and know more.

With that in mind, here are two books I enjoyed over the summer and one on my “To Be Read” list:

Essays of E. B. White by E.B. White

One of the first books I bought on my own was “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White. I picked it out at a book fair at school when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old and I read it over and over again. Until I stumbled upon “Essays of E.B. White,” I had no knowledge of White’s work beyond children’s literature. (He is the author of “Stuart Little” and “Trumpet of the Swan.”) I was also unaware that he is the White, of Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” not to mention a prolific essayist and contributor to The New Yorker. I picked this collection up and was immediately taken by the clarity, relevance and fluidity of the writing. As I work to develop my craft, books like this become more and more important.

Annie John: A Novel by Jamaica Kincaid

“Annie John” is a coming of age story about a young girl in colonial Antigua that reads like poetry. Kincaid’s prose is lush and enveloping and she too is connected to the storied literary magazine for which White wrote. I’m currently reading “Talk Stories,” her collection of short essays, which appeared as unsigned segments in the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker from 1978 to 1983. It was there, as a very young writer, and surely one of the only Black women contributors at the time, that she honed her skills. Again, my writer heart is thrilled to read and learn. I plan to continue to revisit and explore her body of work moving forward.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Next on my TBR list is a book described by the author’s publisher as “…an exhilarating novel [in which] two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.” Sure, I’ll bite and report back. How could I not? Just look at that cover 🤩 .)

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks.

Please help me grow Occasionally Impervious by sharing it with someone you think might like it too. 🌱 Thank you!

A Few Things:

• Thu-Huong Ha, who writes The Weekly Grief, recently interviewed “Convenience Store Woman” author Sayaka Murata. You can check the interview out here.

• Apropos of nothing I’ve written about today, I’m newly obsessed with the song “My Time” by Bo En. Turns out it’s on the soundtrack for an RPG video game called Omori. (You should know Omori has a content warning and may be inappropriate for younger gamers.)

• Two weeks ago I wrote about shaved ice treats and kakigori. My day one readers know me to be a sweet potato superfan. So imagine my delight when I learned there is a shop in Akusaka that sells purple sweet potato kakigori! 🤤🍠

TELL ME:

Is there a book you read in childhood that warrants a second read? Do you have a favorite book that you return to over and over again? Let’s talk about it in the comments.📚

Reminders:

Please add “occasionallyimpervious@substack.com” to your contacts so it doesn’t land in your Spam or Promotions folder.

*To be fair, DH is a reader and contributes many books, and not just cables, to our collection.😄