My Library

“You cannot open a book without learning something.” ―Confucius

Here’s a scary thought. I’ve acquired an average of one book a day for nearly 40 years. That includes poetry journals and small haiku books, but still, that’s a lot of books. I have about 35 bookcases, all over the house, with books on top of the bookcases, stacked in front of the bookcases, and sideways across the books on each shelf of all these bookcases. I also log all my books and can tell you the date and location where I got each book, and even how much I paid for most books. I also log when and where I finished reading each book, assign each book one or more categories, and keep track of other data such as the ISBN, page count, hardback or paperback, and miscellaneous notes. I’ve read thousands of them, although not most of them, but recognize the Japanese virtue of “tsundoku,” which embraces the fact that it can be useful to acquire books even when you aren’t able to read them all. In my writing, it’s frequently vital to me to be able to look up a book to check a fact or citation, or to consult parts of a book to shore up my knowledge from a particular author’s perspective. I once spent two months reading a book on play theory because I thought it might be relevant to an essay I was reading (I ended up quoting half a sentence). These days you can find a lot of things online, but online resources don’t have my personal notes written into the books. And yes, I read with a pen in hand, making extensive notes, including indexes for topics of interest to me, even writing down vocabulary words, noting quotable quotes on various themes, and sometimes saying what I think of a book. I call this interactive reading. And I’m never short of something to write about, because I have books in special stacks that I already know I want to write about—not “reviews,” but assessment and interactions with the content, often how it relates to poetry, and especially haiku (this is what gave rise to my “Learning From” series of essays on haiku). Will I read all my books? Definitely not, but it’s nice to know that I have them, even though I’ve deliberately reduced my rate of acquisition in recent years. I like to make books too (of the making of many books, there is no end), but mostly I like to read them!

Books to the ceiling,

Books to the sky,

My pile of books is a mile high.

How I love them! How I need them!

I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.

―Arnold Lobel