Chances are you’ve bragged about the size of your library. The number of books you own is a point of pride for many readers. But at what point does collecting books — which few people would say is a bad thing– turn into a problem? At what point, in other words, does it become hoarding? Pair with: Rebecca Rego-Barry on hunting for rare books at college library book sales.
Bookshelves Ten Feet High
In Praise of the Booker
In light of Howard Jacobson’s victory for The Finkler Question, Laura Miller at Salon explains why the Man Booker Prize is the best of the literary awards.
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“The Book Was Better.” Or Was It?
Did Baz Lurhmann’s Great Gatsby adaptation leave you feeling a little disappointed? Then consider Kate Kelsall’s short list of “utterly compelling cinematic adaptations” to be just what the doctor ordered.
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“Our sturdiest atheists”
Recommended Reading: Millions contributor Michelle Huneven on Charles Baxter’s There’s Something I Want You to Do.
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Cather People
For The New Yorker Alex Ross describes the role Nebraska’s prairies played in Willa Cather’s writing, his encounters with Cather people, and how he became one himself. “From this roughshod Europe of the mind, Cather also emerged with a complex understanding of American identity. Her symphonic landscapes are inflected with myriad accents, cultures, personal narratives—all stored away in a prodigious memory. “
“But I can tell you about my kitchen.”
At The Nervous Breakdown, Antonya Nelson interviews herself. She reveals why she writes stories, and describes her new novel, Bound, due out this fall.
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The Right to Be Average
“The call isn’t for a literature to, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has described, stop people from hitting us. […] But for a multiplicity of presence. A mingling, if not an acceptance, of a duality of presence. The right to be average. For the black guys in our literary fiction, if nowhere else, to be given the benefit of the doubt.” Over at the Ploughshares blog, Bryan Washington makes a case for inclusion in literary fiction.
Me and my husband have a library at home almost full of books. On every trip that we make it is a policy to bring a book back home. I don’t think we’ll have a problem using the stairs as a bookcase when the library is full. I don’t believe in the phrase: “I have too many books” … There is and always will be space for books around us; it’ll never become hoarding to us :)
My parents are always nagging me about all the books I have. He doesn’t read much, and she has me check a book out from the library if she wants to read something specific. Neither of them care that I want books mostly to have the information, and many of my books are either the only copy I’ve every come across, library sell-offs (negates the “borrow it from the library” argument) or both.
Still, it’s annoying they take up so much space. I’ve compared late 20th-Century printings with 19th- and early 20th-Century copies and concluded modern publishers put a lot of unnecessary whitespace in their page design. And then they’ve got the balls to whine about production costs. Must think everyone buys books by the yard.