A World of Books

A few weeks ago, at back-to-school night, I saw the list of books our high school sophomore will read for English this year. I had to bite my tongue not to say “Oh, we have those, somewhere...” — because usually I can find every other book but the ones we need. Someday we will discover a box in the basement containing every missing selection on the high school curriculum: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Jungle, The Scarlet Letter.

Meanwhile, the books that I do find are distressingly yellowed and priced at 69 cents. You must open them carefully, so that their bindings don’t crack and their pages fall out. Along their margins is such English major scrawl as “obsession with the body shows the importance of the physical” and “dichotomy of city and country echoes Romantic themes.” But I’m proud of these books, and of the occasional comments the girls have reported back to me from their English teachers: “I used to have that edition when I was in college” or “I can see your family holds onto things.”

The late Susan Sontag said of her library of 15,000 books: “What I do sometimes is just walk up and down and think about what’s in the books, because they remind me of all there is. And the world is so much bigger than what people remember.”