Library Lust

The home library of novelist Rebecca Goldstein and psychology professor Steven Pinker has a ladder on wheels for getting to the top shelves, high ceilings, a hardwood floor, an Oriental carpet, and plush midnight-blue sofas. Surely the light in this room is perfect for reading?

But envy dissipates on reading that  Goldstein “grew up in a family that considered book buying a luxury for rich people.” The first book she ever bought was Walden, with babysitting money, when she was 14; the first book she bought after getting a MacArthur prize was an edition of William Yeats’s Collected Works that she’d been “longing for.” Pinker ordered their shelving over the Internet and put the white cubes together himself, and he even did a “hammy sales pitch” for the furniture company, which ended up on YouTube.

Compared to the cool elegance of the Goldstein-Pinker collection, the library of novelist Junot Díaz spreads through his apartment in a riot of color and jumbled piles, with books in the bathroom (the ones he reads quickly), the kitchen (horror, fantasy, young adult, science fiction), and hallways (everything). He gives books away, to neighbors (he lives in a “literary building”) and to a homeless couple who sells them on the street.

Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books is filled with juicy details about how writers read, collect, and live with their books. Published this month by Yale University Press, it is the second book in what the press hopes will be a “vibrant” series. Two years ago Yale published a volume on architects and their books, and it’s planning one on artists for 2012.

The current book features interviews with 13 writers and luscious color photographs of their collections, including close-up shots of individual bookshelves, allowing for gratifying voyeurism as one visually rambles through, say, Gary Shteyngart’s shelf of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Anatole Broyard’s memoir Kafka Was the Rage, The Stories of John Cheever, and several volumes of Nabokov. In the library of Sophie Gee and Lev Grossman, The Odyssey and several editions of The Iliad share a shelf with the Twilight vampire series, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, A Moveable Feast, and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.

Leah Price, an English professor at Harvard, serves as editor and interviewer; she also chose which writers to feature (with Yale’s in-house editor for the book, Michelle Komie). The goal, says Jessica Holahan, the press’s marketing manager for art and architecture, was “a balance of men and women in different age groups, and who work with different genres of fiction.”

Alison Bechdel, for example, is a graphic novelist, whose library includes fiction, visual art, and illustrated volumes. (Her collection is dizzyingly eclectic, with psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott sharing space with Edward Gorey, Hannah Arendt, and Daphne du Maurier.) The library of Stephen Carter, a law professor at Yale and a novelist, “reflects his deep interests in history and religion, as well as contemporary fiction.”

Price and Komie purposely included couples, because of the interesting questions that arise when book lovers share space. Gee and Grossman’s books are intermingled: “Once we merged our books, we knew there was no going back,” Grossman says. Claire Messud, when asked if she “interfiled” her books with those of her husband, James Wood, said: “Some of our books are separate—poetry and literature, mostly—and some are combined—history, say, or travel books. Certainly we both know at once which books properly belong to one or the other of us, and by the same token, know which books are somehow shared. I can’t explain how we know this, but as far as I recall, we’ve never disagreed about a single volume.”

The section on each writer concludes with his or her list of “top 10” books. Goldstein and Pinker list each other’s books (How the Mind Works for her, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God for him). Middlemarch gets the most hits, listed by Goldstein, Gee, and Philip Pullman; To the Lighthouse, Lolita, and Anna Karenina tie for second.

Roget’s Thesaurus of Words and Phrases makes Bechdel’s list, along with Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet. (Hergé makes Pullman’s list, too.) Carter goes for Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness (really?) and The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. Lewis shows up again on Grossman’s list (two of the Chronicles of Narnia), along with Alan Moore’s Watchmen comic books.

Jonathan Lethem is fond of Charles Willeford—both his crime novel Cockfighter (an Amazon customer calls it “the Moby-Dick of cockfighting”) and A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided, a 32-page, self-published account of his hemorrhoid operation. And it’s good to see appreciation of the novels of Henry Green: Loving makes Wood’s list, and Nothing Edmund White’s.