I’m often asked (by my wife, roughly once a week) why I need to keep books that I have already read, and why the bookshelves can’t be cleared to make way for more useful items such as knick-knacks, assorted pens, and random scraps of paper.
My stock answer is that books are not a single use item, but are intended – in the same way as a favourite CD or film – to be taken out and enjoyed time after time, depending on one’s mood and what suits it.
While this is the truth, it is not the whole truth. It’s not so much that I re-read books to enjoy specific passages once again, or to discover different nuances and perspectives. It’s that I can’t really remember them from the first time around.
In fact, sometimes I can’t remember if I’ve read it at all, despite a hasty skim down the blurb at the back of the book. ‘I don’t know!’ should never really be an acceptable answer as to whether you have read a particular book, but unfortunately it has to be.
Why is this? I don’t have any difficulty remembering the lyrics to an album last listened to a decade ago, and I’m sure I could recall whether I had seen a particular film or not, so why the trouble with books?
It’s not just me. Here’s Alan Hollinghurst’s Daphne Sawle in The Stranger’s Child, who has been musing on the difficulties of remembering details of incidents, meetings and conversations:
“She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books, about music and art—she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were things people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did.”
That ‘pointless even to say that she had read them’ is a killer line; after all, what is the point of reading something you don’t even remember?
These are some of the books I am reasonably sure I have read, but would struggle to remember much about at all:
The Interpretation of Murder by Jeb Rubenfeld. I know Freud is in there, but that’s about it.
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. Nothing.
The Information by Martin Amis. Which is an odd one, because everything else by him is as clear as daylight to me.
The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy. See Martin Amis, above.
The Accident by CL Taylor. This is one where even reading the blurb didn’t bring anything back.
But I don’t necessarily think reading these books was pointless. And I don’t think it means they are poor books. In fact I’m sure it doesn’t.
Reading books is different to listening to music or watching a film; it’s not an experience that is particularly rooted in a time or place. I can remember where I was living and how I listened to The Queen Is Dead when it came out (on cassette tape, in a grotty top floor flat in Forest Fields, Nottingham); I can remember where and who I saw Schindler’s List with (Chris, at the old ABC in Nottingham); but I’ve no idea when or where I read any of the books above.
Without these reference points to cling to, books risk floating around as vague entities, doomed to an unloved and unremembered life until, one day perhaps, they are plucked out of obscurity and opened once more.
And that’s why I can’t clear the shelves.
