Dilemma

I have a problem.

I've known this for months, but I've just kind of ignored it in the hopes that I won't have to deal with it for awhile. But the other day as I shuffled the books on my bookshelf to make room for the book I'd just finished reading, I realized that I am going to run out of room sooner than I thought. And since I've already about reached the limit on space in my apartment, buying another bookshelf is not an option. Someday I will have a salary and a house and, if I'm lucky (and rich) I can have an entire roomful of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for my ever-growing collection. But for the next few years I am living on a student stipend in a rather small apartment, and the consequence of my book-buying habit is that soon, very soon, I am going to have to get rid of some of my books.

I haven't absolutely loved every book I've ever read (though I know my own tastes well enough that I almost always at least like what I pick out for myself to read), and so you'd think it wouldn't be that hard to scan my shelves and remove the books that were just ho-hum and drag them to the library or one of the many local used book shops. But the problem is that, even if a book is just good and not great, my bookshelf has become sort of a reflection of my history, and getting rid of even a ho-hum book is almost the equivalent of ripping a page out of my journal. I may not mind today, but someday I'm going to look back and there will be a piece of my life conspicuously missing.

I didn't realize how attached I was to my books until I sat down and seriously considered which I would get rid of if I absolutely had to. My eyes focused on one of my books almost immediately - Snow Mountain Passage by James Houston, a historical novel about the Donner Party that I read several years ago when I first started buying most of my books instead of borrowing them. I remember enjoying this book (I mean, to the extent that you can enjoy a book about such a tension-ridden and ultimately tragic journey), but I don't remember much of it anymore, and it wasn't one of those classics that everyone should plod their way through at least once, and it didn't change my life, and so it doesn't seem to meet any of the qualifications for a keeper.

I read the book in the first place because I had listened to an hour-long interview with the author on the radio show, and was intrigued. (I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.) This was the summer that I worked for the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History, scanning books and manuscripts for storage on some sort of church history database. I worked in a little office in the Knight Mangum Building, which I shared with another student employee who did something a lot more technical (and probably worthy of higher pay) on the second computer. When I first began working there, he asked if I minded if he listened to NPR while we worked. At the time I had no idea what NPR was but it sounded like something I should know, and so I shrugged and said it didn't bother me, and for the rest of the summer I spent four hours a day listening to Morning Edition and the Diane Rehm Show and whatever came after that.

The point is that that's where I heard about this book in the first place, and when I reached to remove Snow Mountain Passage from my bookshelf, I was stopped almost instantly by a flood of memories - of scanning and reading notes from 19th century bishops' meetings in the Salt Lake Valley and an account of the first mission to Hawaii and No Man Knows My History, of the smell of summer coming through the open windows into our non-air-conditioned office, of conversations with my coworker about how to run a 10-miler before I had ever dreamed of running more than three or four, of my entirely illogical (and very minor) crush on the guy who worked in the main office who I never actually talked to, of walking to campus in flip-flops and returning home to ultimately ill-fated roommate dinners, and eventually of all the good memories that I associate with that summer even outside of work.

I slid the book back in place very quickly.

And then I looked in despair at the rest of my bookshelf, because I couldn't imagine that anything else would be any easier to get rid of. Tuesdays with Morrie (which I didn't really like much) was what I read on the plane back from my trip to Michigan the weekend that I realized that I needed to be in Ann Arbor - that's a pretty pivotal moment in my life and I can't get rid of the book because of it. Hamlet (which I do like, but it's a pretty cheap copy that I could, theoretically, part with fairly easily) came from a memorable trip to the Utah Shakespearian Festival with a good friend when I first moved back to Utah. And Focault's Pendulum, which I didn't like at all by the end, is something of a trophy because I actually made it all the way through, where my mom, normally unable to put down a book once she's started, finally gave up two-thirds of the way in. I may not have enjoyed the book, but complaining about it was a wonderful bonding experience with my mother!

And so it goes. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do because I am very nearly out of room. I could start double stacking, but it's not nearly as aesthetically pleasing. Or I could just stop buying books and visit the library instead, but then I would erase my future from my bookshelf for the sake of preserving my past. Or I suppose I could just set aside my book money for the next few months and buy myself a TV (except that in my family, the TV is still sometimes simply background noise to whatever book we're buried in).

Or I could just suck it up and throw a few books into a box for the library without thinking too much about it.

But I still have a few more books to get through on my to-read shelf before I'll have to make that decision.