where my books reside

is this a scholar's origin story?

i am an obsessive person. this obsessive trait emerges when i am interested in a person/place/thing, or when a person/place/thing does not fully make sense in the connections, experiences and paradigms through which i have assembled a sense of the world.

embarrassing example : when i develop a crush on a person, i can tend to get obsessive. in a non threatening way, my mind quickly and constantly returns to them. they are something i chew over and often this chewing impedes everything else in my life. sometimes this chewing becomes a gnawing pain, and my attention has to be deliberately redirected.

less embarrassing example : my obsession with books.

i fell into academia. i had always been a reader which i am now learning, provided me the foundation to exceed at comparative analysis, deep diving into obscurities, and obsessing over phenomena that is required to live this professor life. i had some cool teachers who encouraged me to develop a fucking point of view and to trust myself with my obsession with language. even ideas that eluded me, became burrowed into my brain, constantly re-contextualizing themselves as i burned a path through many obsessive interests.

this obsession is often dormant to the untrained eye, as it is concealed within my running mind. perhaps the most physical manifestation of this obsessive tendency is my library.

my family was very into reading when i was a kid. my grandfather is an insistent man and one of my core memories from childhood is sitting with him, reading The Wizard of Oz at about 3 or 4 years old. as we read along together, he would make me circle all of the words that i stumbled over in pronunciation and comprehension. we would grab a dictionary and look them up. early on, i cultivated a connection to reading, and the way it allowed me to examine and to expand my world even when my daily conditions could be dull.

our home library was not particularly immense, but there were always books in random nooks throughout the house. i remember one particularly hormone filled summer when i was a preteen, i stumbled upon the book Summer Sisters by Judy Blume in my grandparents home in Arizona. this was before they moved there, and us with them, when Arizona was only long bored hot summer days wasted. Blume was known to me as strictly a children’s book author and one of my favorites at that for the strong, weird young girls she made her main characters. eleven year old me soon found out that Blume also wrote adult fiction and i soon was enamored with her novel about female friendship and hushed sapphic desire, as I lived vicariously through the young girls emerging as women beachside. those summers in Arizona was so far from beachlike, rarely a breeze graced my face. and i lacked age mates to play with as my grandparents’ new home was within a retirement community.

the months of summer often became times when i would ravenously consume all sorts of books as i fantasized about all the things my classmates were doing on vacations and play dates. books solved my loneliness.

i slowly developed a collection of my own books thanks to my grandparents buying me them at every occasion. my mom and grandma knew that a trip to the library or Borders would calm any of my angsty days.

i would also shed those books as i moved away for college, or sold all my belongings for some extra coin during college. it wasn’t until graduate school when i decided that my books deserved a home.

soon my bookshelf became a home office as i moved into an apartment of my own. not even just a home office but a central figure of my open floor plan living space. the front window had a seat attached, fulfilling images I’d had since childhood of young girls reading in windows. from this window seat you could see all the way back through the living room, home office and kitchen to the back door. you could also see parts of my bedroom which was adjacent to the kitchen, down a separate hallway. my books were the central to the sense of home i cultivated there. and when 2020 arrived, i would find myself drawn to the names on the spine, once again coddling my loneliness.

i had also become a teacher somehow along the way and so now my books became books i talked about openly. my understandings of them shifting with each class i was reading them alongside. they were my main avenue of communication with a world that became harder to engage as my understanding of its contours became more defined. i hosted a few book parties before Covid in an attempt to demonstrate a togetherness that was alluding me at the bars we frequented at the time. i wanted to get lost in language and be transformed in my friendships. i wanted positive obsession.

when we moved to Missouri, i only purged about five or so books. i was arriving to my first big girl office which included a beautiful built in bookshelf reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast. when we arrived, i was still finishing my dissertation and rushed to move into my office so i could begin to unwrap my main tools in finishing my PhD, the voices i called for context, precedent, and futurity. as I’d progressed through the pandemic and my graduate degree, my bookshelf spoke now to lineage of thinkers that informed a past denied to me in other arenas. the context for my life lay within those pages, my scribblings in response expanded the life of these books towards something i have yet to see in a final form. my citational memory was a core component of the self i had created.

after graduating and starting my job, i began to mourn this distance between myself and my books. sometimes i feel as though parts of myself cannot be accessed because of this divided archive. i hope to resolve some of these ill feelings once we redesign our big shared space, perhaps with a second desk for my casual writing and book hoarding. but i also know that this may just be another part of my growth as a reader, who made reading a big part of her job.

i still keep a small bookcase [and random piles around the house] of books waiting to be read and books i tend to reread when i need a push to continue. no home complete without the voices and expansive language between the pages, reminding me of life outside the confines of my mind.