Should our bookshelves be a reflection of ourselves? If so, should they be a reflection of ourselves throughout our lives, or should they be emended as time goes by and we change and grow into different people than we were one, two, five, ten years ago?
I was asking myself these questions while making a new profile on yet another website that could substitute goodreads. I did a simple database import, but then I stopped to think if I shouldn’t delete some titles that simply do not reflect my tastes anymore. What does my rating on, say, a young adult saga I read ten years ago mean now? I’m not interested in the saga anymore: it brings me neither nostalgia nor excitement, as I’d lost interest in it before it even ended. Lawrence Lessing writes, in his Introduction to The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz:
“Writing reflects thinking. Thinking evolves. Who we were at nineteen does not reflect who we were at twenty-five, or who we would have been at fifty. Learning looks like inconsistency. Changes seem unjustified, since they’re rarely even acknowledged.”
Inconsistency. It feels inconsistent with the person I am now to find some titles on my virtual bookshelves; if I owned them physically, I’d donate them to a book crossing station or a public library.
And yet: I cared about those characters once; I used to enjoy those books. I ask myself, am I negating a part of myself? Are shelves a chronology or a self-portrait? Am I emending or am I editing out aspects I don’t feel proud of anymore? But there it is: I don’t think everything we ever read becomes an aspect of ourselves.
Some things we hold on to, while we let go of others, often unconsciously; some books just resonate with us more, and stay with us longer; others flow away. Alice writes to Eileen, in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, “in my deepest essence I am just an artefact of our culture.” I feel that keenly. If we are made of the the art we consume, some becomes embedded into our selves, and some slowly detaches itself from us; we lose it as we grow.
This was originally a caption for a post on my instagram which I wasn’t going to post here on my blog; however, I immediately received so many lovely comments that I decided to keep a record of them here as well. Most comments agree with the sentiments expressed in the post. Claudia @thestoriesilovebest said she only keeps the books that made a mark on her and donates the rest, and Alessandra @ale.biblion expressing a similar sentiment added, “they may become someone else’s favourites,” which I loved. Angie @babeioteca gives away her childhood books to kids who might enjoy them, and Stefania @inliterary likes to look at the books she loved in the past to remind herself of her growth (which Simone @simlib also does), but she also keeps them so she can lend them out to friends and family (I adore that). Cristina @stvpormundi commented that she believes the books we read say something about us, but that they stay with us or not depending on their quality: those who stay are those capable of transforming and saying new things through the years. I agree wholeheartedly.
Discussing literature and books with people is why I made this blog. These comments truly fill my heart. Thank you.
Read this today, and made me think of my own reading. I'm of the opinion that everything stays with us in different ways, and even the unremarkable stuff transforms us because we learn about our tastes and never want to read something so mediocre again. A lot of the books I read as a kid transformed me, it affected my stylistic choices as a writer, my love of a personal, intimate narrative voice, humor, and keeping the readers engaged. Meanwhile, a lot of YA books, I don't bother to track down or remember it, especially the stuff I read during the pandemic. They're all similar, they have the ironic purpose of making the really good stuff just pop out, making you remember the principles of good storytelling.
I read your post yesterday and I really enjoyed it! Similar to you when I made my storygraph account and did the data import I felt I couldn't keep all of these ya fantasy books I read as a teen because I have lost all connection to them and so I ended up removing almost all of them... I only kept the record of the ones that occupied a significant part of my life(namely the Grishaverse books). The interesting part is that I have no need to remove these titles from my goodreads account, I can allow it to stand as a time capsule, but the chance of the blank slate that storygraph offered made me want to seriously reconsider what should stay as a representative of my current taste. Today I stumbled upon Ursula K. Le Guin's poem 'Leaves' and it made me think of this post again, and urged me to reread it! https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148293/leaves-5bd9e153d78b2