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In Our Parents’ Bookshelves
The Millions has a great essay about one difference between conventional books and electronic books that we may not have considered. You can learn a lot about someone by seeing what books they’ve kept. Perusing someone’s bookshelf can lead to great conversations as you see what interests they have and what you might have in common. The author discovered his own mother as a person who had a life before he came along by noting the books she read, still displayed on bookshelves in his grandparents’ home.
And then there was my wife, whose bookshelves I first inspected in a humid DC summer, while her parents were away at work. The shelves were stuffed full of novels—Little House on the Prairie, The Andromeda Strain, One Hundred Years of Solitude—that described an arc of discovery I had followed too. At the time we met, her books still quivered from recent use and still radiated traces of the adolescent wonder they’d prompted. In the years since, on visits home for the holidays and to celebrate engagements and births, I’ve watched her bookshelves dim and settle. Lately they’ve begun to resemble a type of monument I recognize from my mother’s room. They sit there waiting for the day when our son will be old enough to spend his own afternoons puzzling out a picture of his mother in the books she left behind.
With the availability of e-readers and books on the internet, will anyone ever know what the next generation will find important to read and to keep? Link -via Metafilter
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