Thursday, December 6, 2012

The Past Through Letters

My living room now holds a literary history of my life. In the past couple of days, I obtained the last few boxes of my possessions, including a box of research that is now readily available online (but which was hiding my clarinet music, which pleases me greatly), several boxes of keepsakes that I am trying to squash into one or two boxes and the remainder of my book collection. When I moved from home, I boxed up the ones I thought I wouldn't need urgently, finding in the end that I had to open a few to find a book (and after all that, my copy of Salem's Lot remains at large). And they are now shelved in my living room.

I dislike getting rid of books. It seems wrong, somehow. Illogically, it feels like they're being abandoned but more than that; it feels like giving up a piece of my past. I deeply regret getting rid of many of my Point Horror and Babysitter Club books when I was trying to feel mature. Such things should be enjoyed in later years!

The books in the Last Boxes are a scattering of some early childhood ones, many teenage books and a number of college texts. It's a strange combination, as expediency and practicality meant that I needed to place the books according to size, not content, genre or, in some cases, authorial order. So To Kill A Mockingbird sits above The Silver Chair, and I can't help but remember the mock trial we had in secondary school and wonder at how I never got the rest of the Narnia books, in spite of my adult self's problems with CS Lewis. A large Star Trek book rests between King's Black House and The Illustrated Library of World Poetry. There are books on writing, fortune telling, forensics, psychology, Egyptology, archaeology, literature, and criminology. There are Point Horror books and one of the most complete collections of Christopher Pike novels anyone may ever see, not to mention the major part of my Stephen King collection.

It seems eclectic and strange and too many different things at once, but it's all brought together by the fact that I own them; that their words and ideas and styles, be they good or bad, opened up my mind to other worlds and other dreams. And some of these books were loved perhaps a little too much, and are worn, or, in one case, in two pieces, but they still deserve a place on the shelf, because they tell part of my story. That makes them more than what they once were.

I am, to the amusement of many, I am sure, a fiction girl. I need a story. I recently commented to Swordsman, in regards to my needing to read webcomics to wake up fully in the morning, that I clearly run on narrative, and I think it's true, not just of me but of all other writers in the world, regardless of what they write. And those old books were some of the formative fuels of my life, and that makes them beautiful, even if I was once so clumsy as to crack the spines.