Moving (Again)
Friday, September 26, 2003
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Until last week, when I moved for the second time in a year, I really loved my job. I work for a magazine here in Chicago, and my job involves reviewing a lot of books. I have two specialties as a book critic: I review many books about the Islamic world, and I also review most every book that is published about conjoined twins. That may not seem like a big task, but the Conjoined Twin as literary archetype is huge right now, and I'm pretty sure that last year more books about conjoined twins were published than there are actual conjoined twins.
One of the first things I realized when I started working at Booklist is that my mother was wrong when she told me, "You can never have too many books." For instance, I own too many books-eleven-about or featuring conjoined twins, and too many-147-about terrorism. Until recently, these books were displayed prominently in our library, which for the record was also our dining room and our kitchen, in hopes that visiting young women would find them impressive and think I was smart and want to lay in bed with me and read about conjoined terrorists.
But recently we had to move (which is a long and familiar story involving my lying, Hummer-driving landlord, who has single-handedly turned me on to the idea of Class Warfare), so I had to put the couple thousand books I've acquired over the years into boxes.
After I'd packed them, I remembered what I learned the last time I moved: the one unassailable fact about literature is that books are heavy. So I unpacked the books and tried to weed out the losers.
Surely, I thought, I don't need to keep Booty Killer, a novel that tries to be Bridget-Jones-for-guys but succeeds only in being almost breathtakingly awful. No woman is going to see Booty Killer on my bookshelf and want to make out with me. But then I got to thinking about that one part where the narrator's best friend tries to seduce goth girls over the Internet, and I thought maybe I'd want to re-read that scene one day, because A. it was pretty funny and B. it had some pretty good tips on how to seduce goth girls over the Internet.
And so it went for hours, as I found reasons to keep books devoted to the premise that Saddam Hussein would unleash mustard gas on the world by the end of 2002, and books I know full well I'll never read, like The Creation of Psychopharmacology. In the end, I threw away a single volume, the Owner's Manual to my long-deceased Volvo 240, and even that hurt almost too much.
There comes a time in all our lives when we realize we aren't as young as we used to be, that we can't just go begging our friends to help us move thousands of books and one pull-out couch that judging from its weight contains somewhere within its recesses a fortune in pure gold. We all reach the point where we give in to the onslaught of aging and just call professional movers. But darn it, I'm not that old yet, so my roommates and I enlisted our friends and acquaintances, and we did it. From the 147 terrorism books to a bed frame that seemed tailor-designed not to fit through a doorway, we moved it all.
Well, actually, I had to review this great new novel about a love square featuring two sets of conjoined twins, so mostly I just sat in the U-Haul and read, regretting the loss of that lovely and informative Volvo Owner's Manual, which my moving pals could have easily carried. So maybe mom was right: I guess you can't have too many books, provided you also have plenty of friends who will work for beer.
Until last week, when I moved for the second time in a year, I really loved my job. I work for a magazine here in Chicago, and my job involves reviewing a lot of books. I have two specialties as a book critic: I review many books about the Islamic world, and I also review most every book that is published about conjoined twins. That may not seem like a big task, but the Conjoined Twin as literary archetype is huge right now, and I'm pretty sure that last year more books about conjoined twins were published than there are actual conjoined twins.
One of the first things I realized when I started working at Booklist is that my mother was wrong when she told me, "You can never have too many books." For instance, I own too many books-eleven-about or featuring conjoined twins, and too many-147-about terrorism. Until recently, these books were displayed prominently in our library, which for the record was also our dining room and our kitchen, in hopes that visiting young women would find them impressive and think I was smart and want to lay in bed with me and read about conjoined terrorists.
But recently we had to move (which is a long and familiar story involving my lying, Hummer-driving landlord, who has single-handedly turned me on to the idea of Class Warfare), so I had to put the couple thousand books I've acquired over the years into boxes.
After I'd packed them, I remembered what I learned the last time I moved: the one unassailable fact about literature is that books are heavy. So I unpacked the books and tried to weed out the losers.
Surely, I thought, I don't need to keep Booty Killer, a novel that tries to be Bridget-Jones-for-guys but succeeds only in being almost breathtakingly awful. No woman is going to see Booty Killer on my bookshelf and want to make out with me. But then I got to thinking about that one part where the narrator's best friend tries to seduce goth girls over the Internet, and I thought maybe I'd want to re-read that scene one day, because A. it was pretty funny and B. it had some pretty good tips on how to seduce goth girls over the Internet.
And so it went for hours, as I found reasons to keep books devoted to the premise that Saddam Hussein would unleash mustard gas on the world by the end of 2002, and books I know full well I'll never read, like The Creation of Psychopharmacology. In the end, I threw away a single volume, the Owner's Manual to my long-deceased Volvo 240, and even that hurt almost too much.
There comes a time in all our lives when we realize we aren't as young as we used to be, that we can't just go begging our friends to help us move thousands of books and one pull-out couch that judging from its weight contains somewhere within its recesses a fortune in pure gold. We all reach the point where we give in to the onslaught of aging and just call professional movers. But darn it, I'm not that old yet, so my roommates and I enlisted our friends and acquaintances, and we did it. From the 147 terrorism books to a bed frame that seemed tailor-designed not to fit through a doorway, we moved it all.
Well, actually, I had to review this great new novel about a love square featuring two sets of conjoined twins, so mostly I just sat in the U-Haul and read, regretting the loss of that lovely and informative Volvo Owner's Manual, which my moving pals could have easily carried. So maybe mom was right: I guess you can't have too many books, provided you also have plenty of friends who will work for beer.
