Now there are empty spaces on bookshelves which were once densely populated and over-flowing.But some books have escaped the cull for years, and probably always will. Their spines crowd the shelves with memories of years gone by, as evocative as the fading photographs in my albums.
Books studied earnestly for uni seminars and essays – which I have noticed also still populate the bookshelves of my contemporaries – sit alongside biographies and autobiographies of politicians and favourite celebrities. An interest in the presentation of the lives of others seems to have permeated all my book-reading decades.
Yet the attraction of dialectical materialism seems to have given way to a fascination with magical realism in my later twenties. Columbian fiction, native ameri
can shamanism and handbooks for the tarot sit a short way from Marx and Engels. Perhaps these political thinkers’ faith in the miraculous “withering away of the state” was not that far removed from the dreams of the shamans.
Then there are the empty spaces occupied by the missing books – those that perished in the cull and were deported to Oxfam. These spaces largely belong to the forgotten plots of novels. Their browning pages, crammed with fading text served only to deter all but the most determined reader.
There is a shelf which should rarely be disturbed. The books that recline here are a displacement activity for writing. If you are reading about writing why aren’t you actually doing it? Get in your writing practice! But perhaps I’m being unfair. I have found Stephen King’s book On Writing a good read.
Other shelves are packed with tour guides to countries spanning all five continents. All but a few are well-thumbed. The few pristine books unfortunately now surplus to requirements due to the alarming changes in the geo-political landscape. Their tenure is likely to be terminated shortly to make way for guides to places soon to be visited.
I suspect a visitor might deduce something of my character and interests, and even my career, from a trawl of my bookshelves. This is less likely in the future, as more spaces appear. The successors to the discarded paperbacks now hide in a virtual library on Kindle or even as an audible book. As i-tunes devoured our music collections so Kindle usurps the printed page. Perhaps our wardrobes, if still cluttered with outfits from previous decades, will be the only tangible clues to our own life histories.
