Books: Can’t get enough of ’em

Harry Kennedy (Richard Armitage) responds to Geraldine’s question about his favorite books in “The Handsome Stranger,” the first of the two Vicar of Dibley Christmas specials that ended the series. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

I was wanting to post something analytical today and just can’t. I’ve got stuff drafted but not the attention to polish or finalize. My head is still spinning from beginning of term. Nothing unusual. In this department we allow students to add until very late, so a lot of little details are crisscrossing my desk unanticipatedly. The university bookstore got the book order wrong (so what else is new?). I’m teaching a survey that covers five hundred years, and then another large course on the history of my favorite country in the twentieth century that I taught for the last time in 1999 that is taking a surprising amount of extra attention from me, I find. Going from zero to two TAs means more coordination than typical; one of these TAs is extremely unsure of herself and needs to be mentored very closely because she needs to be ready for her own classroom soon. I’m mentoring a grad student who needs desperately to finish her dissertation this semester because of visa issues. The student honor society I advise is gearing up for a big semester with a regional conference, a new speaker series, and some other events. I told them for a change that I’d give the initiation talk this term, so I’ve got to write that. It will be something like my swan song here. I’m doing research including a scholarly translation. I’m involved in a few professional service activities. And so on and so forth.

Ros (Hermione Norris) looks down at the books used to create chaos in Lucas’s new apartment in Spooks 1.2. My cap.

The visible sign of the chaos in my mind is the awkward and inconstant procession of books in and out of here — they come in by post and UPS and in big bags lugged over from the library and they leave in essentially the same ways: back to the library, sold back to ama*on, entered in paperbacksw*p.com, collected and sold in fund drives for my student organization, donated to an organization that obtains books for prisoners (of whom there are many in this state). But more always seem to come in than leave. History is a book field and so my life is filled with books. I chose this although lately it’s been driving me crazy. I have a small windowless office — I chose the windowlessness in order to get a few more square feet to store books. This time of year they just go wild, proliferating in every corner, and when the corners are full, in the center of the room. One class has twelve textbooks; the other, ten. I’ve got the secondary research piled up in order to update the lectures in the one class; I’ve got the regular rotation of stuff to read for the other class (in hopes my broader command of the historiography won’t go stale, I try to force myself to read one new monograph on each topic covered in the survey each time I teach it. This is hopeless and I never actually manage it but I learn a lot trying). I owe a lot of book reviews so I’ve stacked those books next to the computer monitor. Perched on my left are the big reference works (lexical in English, German, Latin, biblical, theological, etc.) and snuck in on top of them for perusal in spare moments are copies of The Annotated Hobbit and the Penguin Oronooko, The Rover and Other Works. New copies of journals are waiting to be unpacked, skimmed, placed on shelves. I’ve got a book bag with leisure reading, too. It’s not different at home, as I’ve noted before. If I were going to invite someone into my bed, I’d have to buy and fill an additional bookshelf first.

Which are the books that are essential for interpreting our lives, and which can we leave accidentally, stuffed down in the cushions of the sofa, for others to find and wonder about? Which books make someone Lucas North, and which ones make him John Bateman? Dmitri (Max Brown) gives Harry the copy of Blake’s poetry he and Beth found while tossing Lucas’s flat in Spooks 9.8. My cap.

But the office is at the breaking point already. On top of that I’ll have to move out by the beginning of June. It’s time to begin sifting and winnowing. I don’t have the physical or emotional energy to move all this stuff, and probably won’t have the money, either. Let’s be honest — a fair amount of these items I may never open again. I tried in the wake of the deluge last Friday to shift some stuff that I thought I could live without; it’s waiting in a workroom on the decision of the building people who need to look at the state of the ceiling above my desk. But I really don’t know what to save and what to discard. Part of it is that I truly don’t  know what I’ll be doing next year. Will I need these complicated German-language theological references, or should I attempt to sell them to another scholar? What about the books on the memory of trauma in Guatemala? The collection on secularism and religion in the U.S. public sphere? Part of me is tempted simply to toss everything that is “only” of professional interest — to keep only the books I loved, the ones I could imagine putting on the shelves of the house I never had a chance to buy. Then I wonder how I’d reassemble this collection if it turned out that I was going to need pieces of it.

Mr. Thornton at the Hales’ for his Greek lessons in North & South, episode 4. Which books are the ones that carry us forward? Which ones do we cling to in order to bolster our notion of who we are, or who we might be, if we were different?

I dream of being Lucas, abandoning everything and moving on, even if it’s to an illusion. I fear I am Thornton, studying a topic of no practical use to me anymore, but one that allows me to clinge to a particular notion of who I am. And so the books come, and go, and mostly: accumulate. While I wait for clarity. And crave grapefruit juice — and as always, in the last year, Armitage. [Rueful grin.]

~ by Servetus on January 27, 2011.