What About All That Generational Wealth You’re Hoarding on Your Bookshelf?
The will to store books has little to do with bookstores.
(i)
I happen to like pretty book covers. Covers with oil paintings and the publishing press’s signature font. Clothbound covers decked with intricate patterns. Plain typographic covers for renowned poets’ chapbooks. Illustrious covers with beautiful spines. Vintage-inspired covers. Collector editions of classics with their pigeon-colored spines and jazzy endpapers. Pretty, pleasing, graceful covers. Covers you’ll see in the subway. A little tilted to a side, the title unreadable, but you can discern the telltale signs of The Folio Society’s hardcover editions. Covers you’d like to see on your bookshelf but would always think twice about before buying because one book with a pretty cover could very easily end up being two days’ worth of groceries.
(ii)
The latest eighteen-dollar Fitzcarraldo Editions Annie Ernaux is not an I saw it in the window of an independent bookstore near Prospect Park, and it looked so pretty I had to buy it but rather a calculated choice. Eighteen dollars is not a lot. It is, however, an hour’s worth of toiling away at work. It is an hour’s worth of listening to nagging shoppers buy clothes worth your rent. It is an hour’s worth of cleaning up after said nagging shoppers. It is a full bucket of Korean fried chicken with a side of pickled radish and a soda of choice (I always pick ginger ale) that you’ve been craving for weeks but couldn’t justify buying because you didn’t go to work on Wednesday and are eighteen dollars short on rent. So, I could technically buy a new book. But when it is between rent, Korean fried chicken with a side of pickled radish, and a pretty book cover, fried chicken wins. I can just work an extra shift on Saturday to cover the rent. As for the book, there’s always a library.
(iii)
The Children’s Brooklyn Public Library in Clinton Hill surprisingly has a good catalog of all the books I’ve longingly gazed at in a bookstore. It is where I first read Baldwin. But libraries require patience. They require waiting. As a reader with a specific financial range, patience is a virtue I should possess, considering that I don’t have a lot of options. Even after recognizing the reality I live in, patience isn’t an attribute I have or aspire to have.
(iv)
Pretty book covers have nothing to do with free will, but a girl who works at a shoe store—a girl who is also a friend, a girl who always has glitter on her eyes—has been going around asking people if they believe in free will. I think she believes there is free will, not that she’s answered her own question. Perhaps she’s collecting every answer to see if she agrees. She said so cavalierly and daintily: “Do you believe in free will.” I asked, “Yes? No? I don’t know? Not sure?” I would also have to ask others and then see if I agree. But pretty book covers, I know I would like to own. I just don’t have eighteen dollars to spare.
(v)
-a-
I don’t know what I like to read. I read a book industriously, persisting on it, waiting for the writing to connect, and it never happens. I read a book lazily, casually, on the way to work, on the subway, and it changes everything. I read a book, and I wonder if I should be reading another one instead?
-b-
Collecting and owning a library’s worth of books in one’s house is a hobby for the rich. This is not to say that I don’t own any books. The Target bought bookshelf I paid full price for houses several books that were gifted by friends or picked up off the street—courtesy of the kind stranger that left the books there—or bought at half price, or they were part of the spontaneous, I saw it in the window of an independent store by Prospect Park, and it looked so pretty I had to buy it purchase.
-c-
On the bookshelf sits a used copy of Lucy that a friend lent and I never returned. It still has its price sticker (five dollars) on the title page and little note the previous owner (not the friend) wrote to their friend saying it’s a book that should be passed down. What a beautiful tradition for a beautiful book. To share a book you love with the people you love. I just happen to be the person who will cherish it above all others. On the bookshelf is also a used copy of Bonsai that I found on the street right next to Lincoln Terrace Park in Crown Heights. It has an ugly cover, but it is one of the best novellas I’ve ever read. Never judge a free book by its cover. It is a blessing in disguise. One of the reasons I believe God is real. How else can I justify finding a box full of books—translated literary fiction that I wanted to read but couldn’t buy—on a particularly bad day after getting swindled out of twenty dollars? If this isn’t divine intervention, I don’t know what is. It is only books that I have no choice but to buy that I judge.
-d-
The professor for a creative writing class I take on Tuesdays assigned a list of six books. Six books that I had to buy regardless of a pretty cover. Six books that the professor had reserved at a new independent bookstore on the Upper East Side in a bid to give the bookstore business. Six books stored in the back of 192 Books in a box titled “for Lara’s students.” I have gotten away without buying four of the total six, but the other two I couldn’t find anywhere. Not on the websites that allow downloads of pirated books or in the library. The two books cost thirty-two dollars in total. Crazy for Vincent and Index Cards now sit next to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a pretty book cover I willingly indulged in. I believe good books tend to find you. I just prefer that good books find their way to the bookshelf free of any cost.
-e-
The thing about free will is that I can choose what to do and what not to do. So, I can either work fifty-six hours a week, barely be able to pay rent, and then buy an eighteen-dollar Fitzcarraldo Editions of the latest Annie Ernaux, or I could work fifty-six hours a week, barely be able to pay rent, buy eighteen-dollar Korean fried chicken with a side of pickled radish, and pick up a book at the library.
I hope the friend who wears glitter on her eyes and works at a shoe store asks her question again. “Do you have free will?”
And I will say, “I don’t have a lot of choices.”