In the New York Times this week, Roger Rosenblatt urgess\ us to keep our books. For me, and no doubt for many readers to the Times, this is like counsel to exercise, eat well, and get enough sleep: what else would we wish to do? However, it is not wholly practical.
This past Christmas, I received about 2500 pages of reading matter, say 60% biography and 40% history. I will keep most of this, if only because of who gave it. But it takes up space on the shelves, and shelves are finite. Something else will have to go, sometime. We have only so much space to put up bookshelves.
And how many books are "your" books? If you bought it for a college class or for the neighborhood book club and disliked it, is it "yours" in more than a legal sense? If you can't say how it came to be under your roof, and in any case there is a better edition on another shelf, is it yours? I think that Rosenblatt might have explored the imperfect match of ownership as recognized by the law, and possession as measured by one's engagement with a book.
Rosenblatt concludes by quoting from one of Theodore Roethke's poems. I thought that I had a copy of Roethke's collected poems, but apparently not. Did we give it away or lose it in a move? Or was it a library's and so not mine?
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