This afternoon I was examining the lists my mother kindly made, before I ran off to graduate school, of all the belongings that are boxed up and sitting in my parents' shed. It is a melancholy undertaking.
Box 13, for example, holds an awful lot of books by Colette, Josef Škorecký, Heinrich Böll, and Italo Calvino, as well as two novels by Jane Austen, my copy of André Breton's Nadja, Borges's Ficciones, and some Kundera.
Box 139, rather more recently boxed up, includes Goethe's Werther (which I haven't yet read) and E.T.A. Hoffmann's Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (which I am anxious to read again).
It would be nice to know when I will be permanently reunited with my boxes, and when I will actually have time to read anything that is in them.
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I am also losing track of books in boxes. They are filling my parents' attic, the back of my car, a storage unit. And they are in piles on the floor wherever I am living. Not to mention my system for electronic books. We need proper libraries and personal librarians!
ReplyDeleteTravis
Tenure-track or other permanent employment would prompt us to consolidate our libraries, of course. But I'm all in favor of having a personal librarian. I have enough friends in library school...
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