I don’t alphabetize my books.
Does this shock you?
I’ve discovered that people either look at me in disbelief and horror, as if I just said “I eat endangered song birds for lunch” or else they shrug and say “So? Neither do I.”
Members of the Shrug group then go on to discuss their own patterns of book keeping: volumes are in piles around their bed and their desk, grouped by urgency (“I have the mystery I’m reading next to my pillow, the manuscript I’m reviewing on my desk, the collection of quotations next to the toilet, the book I’m teaching in my briefcase”) or by size (“Art books on the bottom shelf because they’re so heavy, paperbacks on the very top”) or by color (“I do them in a spectrum because my walls are white, the floor is oak, the furniture is black, the window treatments are taupe, and therefore the spines of our books provide necessary color in the room”).
Members of the Disbelief and Horror group don’t say anything for quite some time. They can’t. They are at a loss for words. Language fails them. They simply stare, their expressions eventually settling into ones of pity and loathing as they attempt to comprehend what they regard as undeniable evidence of the disaster, the chaos, and the nasty snarl of my life. “How,” they finally whisper, “do you ever find anything?” They say this in the tone of voice one might use when asking a fugitive from justice how he manages to survive without identification.
The nicest ones have taken my hands in theirs and offered to help. “I’ll come over one weekend and we’ll work on it together. Together we can make a difference.”
While I am grateful for any offers of any kind of help — and am more than willing to acknowledge my need for it in virtually all areas of my life — to these particular good Samaritans I want to say “C’mon, folks, if you want to tackle an important and life-changing project, let’s go through my kitchen and match up the Rubbermaid containers with their tops.”
I like the randomness of my bookshelves. I don’t even pretend to have the kind of order boasted by most members of the Shrug group. It’s too late for that. My shelves are like the Grand Central of books: Old and new are shoved up against each other, academic and mass market elbow one another for room, Fay Weldon is astride Stephen King while Mary Douglas and Jerome K. Jerome look on, even as David Lodge, Jean Kerr, Laurie Notaro, and Chuck Palahniuk jostle for space.
(It’s true that in both my office at home and at work I have copies of my own books on one designated shelf, but that’s just to remind me during my lowest points that I haven’t wasted all my time. Trust me, it’s not a shrine. I consider that the Shelf of Last Resorts, the place I look to when nothing else can remind me that it’s worth putting another word on a page. And even that doesn’t always work.)
So why do I prefer my own disorder to, for example, the brilliant ease offered by the books in my husband’s part of the library — the ones grouped alphabetically within their own periods?
For the same reasons I prefer a real-live bound, paper dictionary or thesaurus to a virtual one, which is the same reason I like libraries and bookstores, which just so happens to be the same reason I like reading promiscuously in the first place: You don’t know what delight an unexpected coupling will offer. There are literally unimagined pleasures arising from the surprising juxtaposition of unlikely words, materials, and texts.
How wonderful to discover what I didn’t know I was searching for, and what fun not to move, always, from A to B.
(Brainstorm illustration incorporating a photo by Flickr user Paull Young)
