I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) Read Online Free Page A

Samuel Richardson, Graham
Greene and the Dumas boys (father and son). He died in the year of my birth. Strait
Is the Gate was one of the Penguins I bought in my early teens. I have
absolutely no recollection of its subject matter (a love story set in the
Normandy countryside, according to Amazon). Literary merit established
conclusively; read, but not really read. Potential for re-reading. But not in
this edition. Potential for going to a bookshop and examining current print
size before considering a Kindle version. (But there is no Kindle edition.)
    In
any case, that gets thrown to the floor and joins the other splayed volumes of
rejects.
    After
a couple of hours, the process of deciding literary merit speeds up
considerably.
    When
I was young, boys invited in for sex would examine your bookshelves. A
collection of novels by Arthur Hailey and Barbara Cartland would not
necessarily be enough to prevent them from ripping off their t-shirts and loon
pants and desert boots, but if you added to the sexual experience a credible
book collection, the move from one night stand to girlfriend was consolidated.
My books had to make up for my LPs. I did not have the definitive album by
Captain Beefheart, though I did have the bootleg Dylan Basement Tapes .
    ‘What’s
this? I didn’t know Tom Stoppard wrote a novel.’
    ‘But
of course – you mean you haven’t read it?’
    Lord
Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the
Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.
    I no
longer need to impress male visitors with the depth of my reading. So what is
the nature of this library? What function does it serve other than being a
filing system for books? What, to use the phrase beloved of cultural criticism,
does it say about me, and to whom is it addressing this message?
    When
builders come in, or grocery delivery men, they often say, ‘Blimey, have you
read all these books?’
    In
friends’ houses, I have stopped inspecting their bookshelves for evidence of
their literary taste because we have all read, more or less, the same books. My
curiosity is limited now to how they store and display them. The former
literary editor of a national newspaper told me the other day that most of his
books are in paid-for storage and have been for years. There is a strong part
of me which thinks that if you don’t have any access to your books, you might
as well not have them, as I believe that tidying things away where you can’t
see them means there is no point in having them at all. I believe in a desk
where everything is carefully composed into a filing system of paper, bills,
staplers, pens, reading glasses, polishing cloths for reading glasses,
dictionaries, thesaurus, earbud headphones, calculator and notebooks, strewn across
the surface.
    I
made this point to him, but he argued that he had first editions of the Brit
Boys: Amis, Barnes, McEwan. I wonder if he thought they were his pension. A
Christmas email from an old friend in Vancouver spoke mournfully of a friend
whose husband is an antiquarian book dealer. The bottom had dropped right out
of that market, she reported, even for first editions.
    My
sister (the one who truncated the eight years of my being an only child)
returned to London after nearly a decade in the USA. She decided not to ship
her books back from a rambling ‘heritage home’ in Chevy Chase to a flat in
Spitalfields so short of storage space that kitchen equipment has to be stored
in cupboards in the living room. As a two-Kindle, one-tablet household, she and
her husband feel no need to populate their precious and very limited shelves
with books they have read and will not read again. ‘Why do you actually need all these books?’ she asked me.
    If
there is a need, it is not a functional one – it’s something else.
    For
one thing, I would be ashamed of being a writer whose house had no books.
    For
another, the books, as I have already said, are a library . In a library,
you do not read