Books and Shelves

My library these days is not as impressive as I would have liked it to be. Sure, I have a variety that is heart warming, a good collection of books I have read a couple of times and more, some that I bought and could not finish through the first couple of chapters. Some just lie there, unread, unopened, waiting for the right time and right mood to strike me to open them.

Everyone has such a combination of books I expect. My book shelves are not impressive either. I had wanted, growing up, to make book shelves of that tamarind tree growing outside the house I grew up in. I would sit and look at it, staring at the gnarled old fella and imagine it laid down flat, one upon another in boards and two by twos. All sanded and varnished of course. I was sure it would be enough wood to fit my present collection and any future needs.

It was not to be. Someone else got to it first, while I was away. In the tree felling tradition that we have so strenuously guarded, out it went. It stood in the way, I was told, of the new cables the telephone company was laying, it was not worth the two or three meters of extra cable it would take to go around it.

So my hopes of a tamarind tree bookshelves were dashed.

Really, books need to be kept well as they are read. You can’t keep Shakespeare in an Ikea bought ready-to-assemble wooden contraption, can you. That would be equivalent to blasphemy. If you had an Ayatollah of Books, you could be sentenced to the fate of Salman Rushdie. Or imagine a couple of volumes of Gibbon on the kitchen table, usually used for the tiny ones to prop himself higher on the chair.

There are some dos and don’ts when it comes to books, all open to be being flaunted of course. That’s true with every religion, I suppose, they make rules and we flaunt them. That’s what makes us human. I don’t follow Prophet Dewey’s dictates when it comes to arranging books. Nope, his teachings are just too boring, too (for lack of a proper word) communistic. How can you classify books thus? Where is the fun, the joy?

I know of people who arrange books by color, I have no qualms with that, or that some like to arrange them by size. A tad boring, that system, pleasing to the eyes but it does not give as much sadistic pleasure as I get when I arrange my bookshelf.

I put the Life of Ayatollah Khomeini next to Nietzsche, a hell of a conversation they must be having, I imagine. Kamasutra, as always, must be in the lower shelf, well within the reach of the young ones. I change the positions too, from time to time. The other day I left Gandhi’s ‘My Experiments with Truth’ right next to a book about Yasser Arafat. ( I don’t have one on Osama, which would have been more appropriate.

Sometimes Moraes gets bored with Ezekiel and needs a change of air, he did not fancy Ezra Pound and anyway did not write much poetry so he keeps moving from ‘Complete Guide to Whiskey’ by Murray to Premchand’s ‘Godaan.’

Naipaul, of course, lies in one bookshelf, surrounded by Banana Leaf Men, some copies of James Hadley Chase Harold Robbins. That is the highest, farthest shelf and needs a tall stool to reach.

Waiting for Kam Raslan’s book and from I what I have read in ‘Off the Edge.’ I reckon I have to find a place for it somewhere close to ‘Life of Pi.’ That on a eyes-level shelf. The best place for a book to be.

God Day All