Books, Nostalgia, and Death

Warning: the following post might get a little depressing, but I’ve tried to end on a positive note. 

I’ve been sorting through my books this week, shelf by shelf. I lay them in rows on the floor, dust the shelf, and replace only the ones I really want to keep. That’s most of them, but I have so many shelves that I’ve managed to pile up a sizable stack for the  library nonetheless.

As I lay them out, I’m reminded of when I read them. The Deryni books? That was college. Piers Anthony and Anne McCaffrey? Mostly high school. Laura Ingalls Wilder? My mom read Little House in the Big Woods to me in first grade, and we went on from there. She still remembers the night we read the chapter “Fever and Ague” and stayed up really late to finish it.

Some of these books I read to my daughter when she was young enough to want to be read to: The Book of Three, Understood Betsy, The Westing Game. Some I got on audiobook so we could share them on long car trips: The Trumpet of the Swan, Bagthorpes Unlimited, Little Women. But a lot of the books I enjoyed growing up, especially the ones I read after age ten or so, she was never interested in reading.

I feel sad as I look at the lines of books on the floor, thinking of the time I spent repeatedly re-reading certain books and knowing that I will probably never read them again nor find someone else with whom to share them. They were important to me at the time, but there are lots of new books that are also good and worth reading, so except for the very best ones (and these are the ones I continue to re-read: Watership Down, Lord of the Rings, Peter Pan) it isn’t worth trying to talk anyone into reading them.

I can’t let go of them either, though, so there they sit on the shelf—the Gemma books by Noel Streatfield, the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander (battered from much love), C. Dale Brittain’s A Bad Spell in Yurt (actually, I suddenly want to reread that one), and so many more. Do people even read Where a Red Fern Grows any more?

So I look at these rows of books that are slowly growing outdated, or at any rate forgotten, and I realize that as the world’s supply of good books continues to grow, almost all books face this fate. Books, like people, have a limited lifespan, with some living much longer than others but none forever. Just as some day I will be gone, the books that helped make me who I am will some day no longer be read—and that includes any books I might myself contribute to the current supply.

That thought is rather depressing, so here’s the attempt at a positive spin. Just as these books helped make me who I am, they also influenced the authors of the subsequent generations of books. Their effects live on beyond themselves, as I hope my own influence will.

And if that isn’t good enough, try this. There are some really great books out there—more than enough for a lifetime. You don’t have to read them all to be glad they exist.

Till next post.