Making lists of many books, there is an end
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For months -- OK, years -- the stacks of clippings have been accumulating at my house. Last month I decided it was time to clean them up.
I may have been prodded toward this decision by the grimace my husband suppressed recently when he put his feet up on the coffee table and sent a wobbly stack flying all over the floor. He's a patient man.
So is our mail carrier. Almost 20 magazine subscriptions weigh down his trips to our house, and some of them -- New York, The New Yorker, National Review and Entertainment Weekly -- arrive more than once a month.
The daily newspaper joins this great forest of dead trees flowing over most of our home's horizontal surfaces. Before they make their way to the nearby Abitibi recycling bin, I glean from each publication the page or two that must be saved -- book reviews, memorable quotes, great cartoons, column-writing fodder, crossword puzzle ideas, must-buy shoes ...
It's all part of my lifelong General Education and Self-Improvement Program, which, as you alert readers have deduced, is a daunting but necessary endeavor.
If I was finally going to tackle the stacks -- reconsidering, jettisoning, filing -- then I was going to reward myself. So I did, just in time for a late summer vacation.
From the first two stacks of clippings, I culled a dozen reviews or ads for books that still seemed compelling. (One of the reviews was a one-paragraph endorsement from a December 2005 copy of InStyle magazine.)
Then -- file this in the personal progress department! -- I divided the 12 books into "must buy" and "must borrow" piles. Why is this progress? Because I used to think that if a book was worth reading it was worth owning. I know -- crazy! This ridiculous belief accounts for most of the other precarious stacks in my house.
Four books made the "must buy" list and were ordered online: "Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States," "How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne," "House of Prayer No. 2" and Edward Gorey's "The Doubtful Guest."
The slender little Gorey was that old InStyle recommendation -- for the perfect hostess gift. Had to buy in order to give. Done.
The Roosevelt compilation and Montaigne biography are serious books I think I'd go to again and again -- and would keep so long past their due date if I checked them out that my overdue fines would have covered their purchase price. Might as well buy 'em.
First Published August 8, 2011 12:00 am
