Fiction: Auster to Herbert
My bookshelf, at a glance, can tell you a lot about me. In the most literal sense, you can see the books I’ve read, am reading, and will read. More abstractly, my shelves are a reflection of myself—fragments of my past self in the form of well-read books, unread and recently purchased books showing the person I aspire to be and the direction I want to move in.
On both my fiction and nonfiction shelves, my unread books greatly outnumber the rest. I have tackled mammoths like Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, and You Bright & Risen Angels but I have yet to crack the spine of slimmer and comparatively simpler texts like W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn or Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. While it’s tempting to criticize myself for the books I haven’t read, it’s important to look at where I am in my reading journey and how I got here.
An interesting trend in my fiction reading and buying is to focus on one author at a time, read two or three of their works, and then move on to something else. I don’t binge the books one after the other, of course, it’s more of an arc that overlaps with other arcs. This all started in college with Kurt Vonnegut. I bought Slapstick, loved it, then read Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. Then it was with Philip K. Dick, whose work I found in the dusty corner of a used bookstore. Somewhere along the line I found Thomas Pynchon (who I decided to read in order for some reason) and David Foster Wallace. Through Wallace, I found the work of Jonathan Franzen. Now I’m probably at the beginning of my Don DeLillo and William T. Vollmann arc. We’ll see where it goes. Aesthetically, I love the idea of being a completionist, someone who owns (and has read) the entirety of an author’s output. In practice I guess I’m more of a sampler.
As 2022 came to a close, I found myself drafting personal reading goals for the year to come. I floated a few ideas like “Read more classics,” or “Read [10, 20, 100] books this year,” but nothing seemed to click. As I looked back on the books I read, I found that my reading was just as spontaneous and clustered as it had always been, focusing on one author or non-fiction subject at a time and then moving on to something new. If my lifelong goal is to have read as many great books and classics as possible, then what does progress look like on a day-to-day scale? Unread books on my shelf represent the direction I want to move in. By surrounding myself with books that support my reading goals, the goals become more achievable. In other words, it’s a lot easier for me to read Don Quixote and Moby-Dick if I can just take them off the shelf. I may not start them for months or years from now but having them readily available means that there is one less hurdle when the time comes.
As a birthday gift to myself last year, I bought a pair of antique bookends—twin hooded monks with pointed beards and a book in hand. The rosary draped over his leg tells you he’s a monk, but the rest of the imagery suggests he’s a kind of wizard or a humble hermit. The latter is the fantasy I choose to believe. The Hermits are, in a way, a physical reminder of my personal goals. To read deeply, widely, and for myself—to be immersed in what I love doing and to make it a regular part of my life.
When my shelves were less packed, it was a lot easier to keep up with my backlog. I would read the books I bought almost immediately after buying them, never giving them a chance to collect dust. Nowadays, having briefly steeped myself in the Bookstagram community, I’m almost overwhelmed with inspiration and novelty. So much so that I decided to take a break from the platform in order to focus on actually reading and writing instead of compulsively adding books to my to-read list.
Now more than ever, my shelf holds books that are more in line with the reader I am and the solitary scholar I intend to be. As my 27th birthday approaches, I’m looking to get a new bookshelf, one that can bear the weight of the tomes I have now and the many more books I will add in the future. If this is to be a lifelong journey of reading and collecting great books, then I’d better find a place to put them all.
Ben Heels 