Books!

[cosmolinguist]

While I was searching for the internet (or rather, the thing that made the internet into wi-fi so I could spend time with my mom while actually typing frantically to sympathetic friends on my phone) I finally found where Mom had packed away all the books that used to be on my huge, sturdy bookcase.

That my mom saw fit to replace all my books with knick-knacks and stuffed animals says a lot about our relative priorities.

I sorted through the four boxes of books, finding about one box worth of stuff I'm at all interested in.

Some that made me absolutely beam to see them again: the Garrison Keillor-edited Good Poems, which I've missed a lot, Anne of Green Gables -- I got the whole set in a box when I was very small; heaven knows what happened to the rest, but it's nice to have the original and I suppose by now I can get the others as e-books if I want to read them again -- the huge Norton anthology of poetry that was so important to me in college, even my Norton Shakespeare, which I was so immersed in the semester I took a class on him when we had to read a play a week.

Having been left so long, there were a lot that mystified me. How did I end up with the German fairy tale? (It's a kid's book, in German.) I remember it, someone actually got it for me in Europe if not Germany (maybe Sarah, when she was studying in France? maybe Seth got it somewhere?). At the time I knew just about enough German to read it, but I no longer do, adding to its mystery.

Mostly I don't think about the life that I abandoned so sharply when I got married. I was very unhappy by the time I ended the era where I had and read all these books. I don't really keep in touch with the people I knew then, or even with a lot of the things I cared about then. A lot of it I don't miss, but I did leave behind some good things along with all the bad. And even ten years later, it's weird and hard, but also exciting and good, to go back and try to sift what I still want, what's still me, what's still worth having around. Andrew's comment to my last entry asserts that I am still in many recognizable ways the person I was ten years ago, which is of course inevitable I suppose but also unsettling to me.

These books are from the first time in my life I really failed at anything, the first time I was depressed though it'd be several more years before diagnosis or treatment. They're from the last time I had a brother.

I kept a lot more poetry from college than I remembered: Yeats, Adrienne Rich, Beowulf (don't need that now; I've got the Seamus Heaney translation I prefer), Anna Akhmatova... and something called Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which I distinctly remember loving thanks to the high school English teacher who changed my life...but I can't remember the poems I loved or even how I ended up with the book, which made for a really spooky petites-madeleines moment. I am both excited to open it and rediscover it, and also savoring the fleeting experience of remembering loving something without remembering why. It must be almost fifteen years since I saw or thought about the book, almost half my life, and isn't it strange that things so important can vanish so completely?

Comments

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

The Heaney translation of Beowulf is excellent.

[cosmolinguist]

One of the things I like about it is that it has the Old English, too, which I (briefly!) was reasonably good at reading, and even now that I've forgotten it all I really wanted a version that included it.

I've got the CDs of Heaney reading his translation, too, which is just awesome.