The Importance of Building a Library
"Having a lot of books is like insurance. You have to live long enough to read all [of them]." - Glenn O'Brien
Reading is sexy and charmingly analog. In our digital age where everyone and their mother is hunched over their iPhone screens, picking up a book (eReaders don’t count) and getting lost in a story is one of life’s simplest pleasures. The chance to get lost in a story is why I read before bed every night.
Perhaps I’m an old fuddy duddy at heart, but one of my life goals is to own 3000 books. I’ve loved books since I taught myself to read as a precocious three-year old (so my parents tell me) and have a hard time letting them go. One of my few regrets in life was selling a part of my library for emergency cash before my junior year of college. Thankfully, I’m now spending such cash on new purchases; over six days in Portland, I spent nearly as much on books at Powell’s as I did at restaurants.
Even if you don’t have time to read every day, books can also function as decor. I feel a slight sense of disease whenever I walk into a home where there are no books because at the very least, they give one’s abode worldly dignity. While books are meant to be read, a slew of good coffee table selections (plus a couple of stray novels) are good things to keep on hand at all times for literary-minded guests and visitors, even if your own private library is small.
My library isn’t huge right now, but it’s artfully disorganized and growing by the week. I give equal weight to classics and modern works that pique my interest, as well as disproportionate room to books and magazines about style and art. I have a series of nine books by Freud that I picked up for a class in college and never sold back to the bookstore - one day I’ll read all of them. I have critical theory books from my time at the Walker Art Center, which make for perfect reading when one finds themselves on public transit. Right now I’m journeying down the way of Swann with Marcel Proust, a memento from my time in Portland. Before that was a sex-and-booze fueled detective novel by James Crumley and David Coggins’ Men and Style, the former which I started on a plane and the latter which I finished on one. I have novellas by Baudelaire and Clarice Lispector, feminist fiction by Chris Kraus and testosterone-soaked prose by Henry Miller and Hemingway. I have a disproportionate number of Esquire and Paris Review back issues, which I read from cover to cover and thumb through thereafter for inspiration.
These titles are a small smattering of my collection, and their place in my library documents my life much like photographs and journal entries do. While such lists sound like a humblebrag, one can never have too many books. Here's to a life well-read.