“Another Shelfie” (photo by m.a.h. hinton)
A great cold has descended upon the North Country. Schools are closed for the next two days which means I am home with a pile of books and no place I need to be. Let’s hope I can make the best of this unforeseen gift.
I have started a couple of additional books in the last week: Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood and Jane Hirshfield’s The Lives of the Heart.
I have not read Sabatini before. He has been on various lists of mine for awhile, especially this novel Captain Blood. I can see why people are so passionate about him as a writer and this book in particular. One third of the way in and I can say it is the perfect adventure book. I have already created a new list of Sabatini’s books on my iPhone. I can see him already becoming one of my new favorite writers.
Lives of the Heart was a book I started to read last summer but set aside. Not because of Hirschfield’s poetry (she is one of my favorite “recent” finds) but because the timing was just not right.
As most readers know, sometimes you just cannot connect to a book at a certain time but then if you pick it up later and start reading it anew, it may end up becoming a favorite. I have noticed that music works the same way for me. I may not like an artist or type of music at one point in my life and then later I can easily find myself a passionate fan of what I earlier disdained.
Nancy Pearl suggests that readers have in mind “the rule of 50.” If you are under age 50, you give a book 50 pages. If it does not hook you, let it go for now. If you are over 50, as I am, she suggests the sum of 100 minus your age. Since I am 58 (soon to be 59), that means I should give a book 42 pages to make its case to my heart. I think it is a good rule.
Having given myself the permission to set aside or abandon any book at any time has taken a lot of pressure off of me as a reader, collector, and book lover. I no longer have to feel guilty about the unfinished volumes in my life or the volumes that briefly caught my eye but now seem to be languishing on the shelves.
To help myself even more, I have developed also the habit of moving books along. If volumes sit unread or unfinished too long, I simply bag them up and take them to a used bookstore to get credit for purchasing some other books that I may or may not connect with.
What that means is that there are some books that I have purchased multiple times in my life. For example, I bet I purchased and then re-sold The Three Musketeers three or four different times over the years before I finally read the entire book. Since I primarily purchase used books, I would estimate that over all I spent at most a combined total of 15.00 to 20.00 on all those volumes over the years. It is not the most efficient method I realize, but passion and efficiency rarely go hand-in-hand.
This is why I have also pretty much given up purchasing ebooks from Amazon, even the free and .99-cent specials. Ebook virtual shelves can become as crowded with abandoned and unread books as real ones. But you cannot bag up ebooks and take them to a used bookstore.
This habit of regularly moving books along has also kept my shelves less crowded and my non-collector spouse happier. If I were to have kept every book I ever picked up over the years, the house would be a fire trap.
So now, with two free days, I will read and make lists and weigh what to keep and what to move on. Wish me luck!