On Culling My Books 📚

Making piles in anticipation of a move, and asking which books you’ll hold onto forever.

The book I’ve owned longest is my brick red Bantam Classics edition of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I know that it’s my oldest book because, on the inside of the front cover, I wrote my name and 7A, referring to my seventh-grade homeroom. It’s one of those items that reminds you that sentimentality is priceless: I’d be so much more bereft if something happened to that book, even though I have the more stunning Susan Bernofsky translation published by Norton right next to it, than if you threw my laptop into the ocean. Everything on my computer is backed up, anyway. One cannot place the tactile memory of Tween’s First Kafka, a book I so specifically recall picking off the shelf at Borders, in the cloud.

The unruliness

To move, I’ve been going through our shelves, which were custom-built by a local carpenter out of reclaimed Puerto Rican wood for a very reasonable price, and which have become so unruly. My books had been in my parents’ garage, gathering dust and debris in Patchogue, alongside a large box that holds all my print publications circa 2015 to 2019, collections of Lucky Peach and Gourmet, and photographs taken with the Canon Rebel SLR I saved up for in high school (purchased in cash at Circuit City). I needed and wanted them with me, but I left the archives of my own work and the photos behind. They weren’t important for this next phase, and there’s always some part of me who’s back home anyway.

Many of these books, like the Kafka, were and are a security blanket of sorts; most are important to my being able to do my job by quickly checking references or quotes or measurements or putting recipes or translations side by side.

But the shelves in San Juan had swelled with the ephemera of discarded research, galleys and publicity copies I’d never requested, and books bought on a whim that didn’t really do anything for me. I did an initial pass and made three tall piles on the living room floor. I just did another and made a fourth pile. There’s more I can live without than I thought, but I also find Waiting for God by Simone Weil—I forgot I bought this, had wanted to read Weil recently and apparently had prepared for this moment—and realize I cannot part even with what I view as the worst work of a favorite writer.

Current desk pile, with 2025 planner awaiting its moment

I’ll come to these shelves many more times in the coming weeks to do my culling, and I’ll find different versions of myself each time. She’ll probably keep the multiples of Alejandro Zambra, an ode to the hopeful version of myself who can comfortably read a novel in Spanish. She’ll never part with the galley of Daniel Sada’s Almost Never, marked for its April 2012 release, because it’s a reminder that she dabbled in literary criticism in her twenties and wasn’t very good at it.

The shelves tell me about who I’ve been and who I want to be, and they tell me that I can be easily broken down into categories, and it strangely doesn’t feel like a bad thing: It feels clarifying. There’s also a good tension in figuring out where my research ends and I begin, and noting the juicy spots where these meet. Those juicy spots are especially prevalent when it comes to cookbooks.