The Madeleine Cakes in My Library

    Although the Cleaning Crew is coming in a few days to do a "deep cleaning" at my house, I have taken on the task of taking every book off every shelf to dust the books and polish the shelves, maybe because I don't think they'll be that thorough and maybe because once I start, I enjoy looking again at my library.

The library

    I began, reasonably enough at the top two shelves, which hold English novels, chronologically arranged—those wonderful eighteenth-century novels I taught at the University of Oregon a few years ago: Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy; nineteenth-century novels, including three or four Dickens' novels; Wuthering Heights, with my teaching notes in the margins, read so many times it is held together by a rubber band; and all of George Eliot's novels, just to read the titles and handle the bulk of which fills me with pleasure. The same thing happens with James Joyce. I probably won't ever read Ulysses again (three times is enough), but to cull it from my library would do a grave injustice to one of world literature's best novels. I couldn't be so crass as to throw it out.

    Below those books are the American novels, chronologically arranged: Hawthorne, Willa Cather, Twain, Hemingway, et cetera through the centuries, including every novel Faulkner every wrote, some of which are also held together by rubber bands. Contemporary novels, English, American, and South African, spill onto other shelves.

    And then two shelves of nature writing. Dusting Bartram's Travels, I remember again the alligator attack and shiver again. Winterdance puts me back at Island Lake, in the Siskiyou Wilderness, where I read that book aloud to Mike, beside and then inside the tent, both of us laughing ourselves silly. Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, the Sierra Club's annual series of best American nature writing, Loren Eisley, Barry Lopez, eight books about swimming and rivers….

   Adjoining shelves hold novels in translation: Italian, Swedish, French, German, Arabic, Spanish, Icelandic, Russian, Norwegian, Portuguese. Below that are my dual-language dictionaries of French, Swedish, Latin, and Italian and books in the original languages: Latin, Swedish, French. I may not be able to read those books any more, but having them on my shelf reminds me how much I once delighted in those languages and those literatures.

    There are books on language and linguistics, on art, music (like that wonderful, little-known book, Music and Women), Bullfinch's Mythology, sixteen books on gardening and crafts and flowers by my sister (Laura Martin), other books by other friends. There is a whole shelf of drama, dominated by Shakespeare. Other shelves witness my literary obsessions: every novel Nabokov ever wrote, plus the two-volume biography by Brian Boyd, a biography of Vera Nabokov, and a wonderful book of Nabokov's lepidopteran travels called Nabokov's Blues. There's a whole shelf of food writing, every issue of the Best American Essays series from 1988 to 2017, and a pretty thorough collection of books by that best of American prose writers, John McPhee. The Norton anthologies of English literature, world literature, and short fiction take up a lot of space, but they blossom with teaching memories, especially in the marginalia.

Top shelf: drama.. Left: Norton anthologies. Right top: Contemporary novelists.
Right next: Food books. Bottom: MacPhee, Best American Essays

   I hope this isn't boring you. I love reading the spines of books in another person's house. When I discovered the whole history of English literature in a stranger's house, I felt an instant affinity with whoever that English major was who lived in that house. Maybe if you studied Old English, you would get the same delight reading the titles of books on one entire side of one of my bookcases, dedicated to Middle and Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon culture—its gardens, dress, food, art, architecture, daily life, and language. I have ten Beowulf books. Chaucer. Old English poetry. Icelandic sagas. Handling each book as I removed it to dust behind it, then repositioned it more firmly among its comrades, brought fond memories of my graduate studies only ten years ago. And there, among the other books, is my dissertation: As the Anglo-Saxon Sees the World: Meditations on Old English. I am especially fond of that little book.

    There are two shelves of poetry, including 101 Famous Poems, the vary same book I read and loved as a child, and Spencer's The Faerie Queene, which I adore, and, you know, Robert Frost and Mary Oliver and Robinson Jeffers and Rumi and Seamus Heaney and Edward Hoagland and on and on. There is a whole shelf of maps, mostly of wilderness areas, many of them with trails outlined in red that I have hiked.

Showing the loft with its books

    In the loft are the nonfiction books and children's books. History and biography are well represented including a very old book called Around the World on a Bicycle that I picked up from my parents' shelves and read when I was a teenager. Science, I'm sorry to say, takes up very little space on my bookshelves. The children's books are pretty tattered. Most were bought used when Ela was a child and I had so little money, and then they were read again and again because they are treasures. To pick them up now is to relive the pleasure I had reading to Ela for all the years of his growing-up. 

    All these books are more than their covers and their pages, and they are more than the stories they tell, the language that gives me such pleasure, or the facts and wisdom they contain. They are storehouses of treasures, each a magic carpet on which I sail through various parts of my past. Just to handle them enriches me again with their art, their characters, the memories they evoke. The tactile experience and the title together are the madeleine cakes that take me back to those rooms in my memory where that book resides.

    There is no madeleine cake in a Kindle.

Reading in the library