![]() ![]() ![]() Plenty of other books in the Stack, however, are perfectly visible, and perfectly familiar. ![]() In others, conversely, I can see the author but not the title: something by Carl Hiaasen, something by Wally Lamb, something by Nadine Gordimer, something by Gore Vidal. In some cases, I can make out the title but had to look up the author: “ Pirate Latitudes” (Michael Crichton), “ Mayflower” (Nathaniel Philbrick), “ Small World” (David Lodge), “ The Way Things Were” (Aatish Taseer). Some tumbled into the Stack spine in, rendering them wholly unknowable, while others fell victim to low resolution, including a few that are maddeningly familiar: an Oxford Anthology whose navy binding and gold stamp I recognize but whose spine is too blurry to read a book that is unmistakably a Penguin Classic, but that hardly narrows it down an Idiot’s Guide to I don’t know what. I have spent a great deal of time studying it, yet find many of the books in it impossible to identify. To my regret, I have only a single photograph of the result. Compression and accumulation-especially accumulation-did the rest. (I have inherited his pragmatic attitude toward books and deliberately break the spine of every paperback I start, because I like to fold them in half while reading them.) In addition to the Stack, my father typically had on his bedside table the five or six books he was currently reading-a novel or two, a few works of nonfiction, a volume of poetry, “Comprehensive Russian Grammar” or some other textbooky thing-and when he finished one of these he would toss it into the space between the dresser and the wall. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. Some people love books reverently-my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. Few generally vertical structures have ever been less stacklike, and no method of storing books has ever looked less like a shelf. It’s true that the younger side of the Stack mounted toward the ceiling in relatively tidy fashion, like the floors of a high-rise-a concession to its greater proximity to the doorway, and thus to the more trafficked area of the bedroom, where a sudden collapse could have been catastrophic. I have no idea why we called this entity the Stack, considering the word’s orderly connotations of squared-off edges and the shelving areas of libraries. At all events, the result was a kind of homemade Arc de Triomphe, extremely haphazard-looking but basically stable, made of some three or four hundred books. For some reason, though, the Stack always looked to me as if it had defied gravity (or perhaps obeyed some other, more mysterious force) and grown down the far side of the dresser instead. At some point in the Stack’s development, it had overtopped that piece of furniture, whereupon it met a second tower of books, which, at some slightly later point, had begun growing up along the dresser’s other side. The Stack had started in a recessed space near my father’s half of the bed, bounded on one side by a wall and on the other by my parents’ dresser, a vertical behemoth taller than I would ever be. ![]() Helens of books, since it seemed possible that at any moment some subterranean shift in it might cause a cataclysm. But by the time I was in my early teens it was the case-and seemed by then to have always been the case-that my parents’ bedroom was home to the Mt. I suppose back then it was just a modest little pile of stray books, the kind that many readers have lying around in the living room or next to the bed. I can’t remember it in its early days, because in its early days it wasn’t memorable. It was this pair of convictions that led to the development of the Stack. The other, which governed the upstairs books, was instituted by my father, and was based on the conviction that it is very nice to have everything you’ve recently read near at hand, in case you get the urge to consult any of it again and also that it is a pain in the neck to put those books away, especially when the shelves on which they belong are so exquisitely organized that returning one to its appropriate slot requires not only a card catalogue but a crowbar. One of these, which governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother, and involved achieving a remarkable harmony-one that anyone who has ever tried to organize a home library would envy-among thematic, alphabetic, and aesthetic demands. When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. ![]()
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