By Nick Hayden
October 22, 2015
About two weeks ago, I moved for the first time in 12 years. With two small kids and another on the way, we had plenty of boxes filled to the brim. The heaviest of these were filled with books. Lots of books. My wife has numerous Advanced Reading Copies of YA novels, and I have a good selection of fantasy tomes, Russian novels, and sundry classics. So, after the kitchen was in working order and our beds were reassembled, the next question was “Where do we put the bookcases?”
In a perfect world, we’d have more bookcases than we do. I mean, we only have seven at the moment, only one of those dedicated to DVDs and photo albums, and one half bookcase that will probably be used for knick-knacks. Seriously, who can get by with only seven bookcases?
First step, deciding where to put them, not an easy task. After that, the unpacking began. It is, at this moment, not quite done. First the important books were unloaded, which for Natasha meant every Ted Dekker book in existence, and for me included Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ray Bradbury.
But what about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a perceptive reader might ask? Well, there’s a whole section for his books across the room, alongside Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities.
Eventually we got to the second-tier of books, those we look at and say, “Oh, yeah, I really liked this one!” but that, for some reason, never comes to mind when we start talking books. Then there’s a shelf for all those over-sized coffee-table-esque collections (like my 20-pound complete collection of The Far Side) and another for that 10-book, leather bound series on world mythology. All the Christian books–commentaries, Schaeffer, Lewis, Piper, Tozer, Swindoll, Yancey, etc–go on another one or two.
Then, of course, are all those books you really don’t remember reading or you don’t think you really liked, but that you can’t quite part with because, well, because they’re books. And you still have room. Somewhere. If you double stack.
And by the time you’re done, you’ve got a real problem, because every time you put a book on the shelf, you flipped through it, and sometimes you thought, “You know what? I should read this again.” Even with City of Golden Shadow, which you’ve twice tried to read, and you should have liked because it was thick and filled with wonderful imagery but for some reason the plot just didn’t work. But you look at that cover and you skim through the mysterious pages and think, “Yeah, why not?”
People can say what they want about the convenience of ebooks. Sure ebooks don’t require you to schedule a chiropractor visit after moving a box of them. Sure they let you live in a tiny house in some beautiful forested area of the northwest. Sure you can carry them anywhere, a thousand of them if you want, tidily organized in the palm of your hand. All true.
But a library in your palm is not the same as one in your house. Flipping through long forgotten pages, seeing your too-numerous underlines and scribbles in school copies, smelling the pages of that copy of Le Morte d’Arthur you bought from your neighbor’s garage sale–these are things a Kindle can’t do and, I think, won’t ever do, not in the same way.
So, yeah, moving books is a pain.
Does it sound like I care?
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