Your Nursing Home 200 Books

[Extollager]

Around June 2009, I and a couple of friends undertook an exercise that might be practical someday.

Each of us owns quite a few books. Very well: Suppose I have to move somewhere, let's say into a nursing home, where I can keep only 200 of them. Which books would I keep?

Over several weeks, each of us posted, in batches of ten (or twenty), the authors and titles of books that he thought he would keep if he could retain 200. (I suggested 200; that sounds like about how many books you could keep in one bookshelf.)

Perhaps some Chronsfolk would like to try this exercise. It's an activity that can help now with decisions about books we have but might as well dispose of. It gives us an opportunity to talk about our favorites and to learn about other people's favorites. And -- who knows? -- some of us might have to make a decision like that someday, and a preliminary list could actually be helpful. Conversely, supposing we have to make that winnowing decision 40 years from now, it might be interesting to have a list that shows us what we thought we'd keep back in 2011/12.

So let's see what you think. Post your first set of 10 or 20 books! I wouldn't worry about listing the books in order such that #1 is your all-time favorite book, etc.

Here was my initial set of 20 books.

The Bible -- New King James Version
Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy
Dickens's Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend
C. S. Lewis's science fiction trilogy
Geoffrey Grigson's Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years
Asbjornsen and Moe's Norwegian Folk Tales -- illustrated by Kittelsen and Werenskiold
Dostoevsky's Demons and The Brothers Karamazov
Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (counts as 2 books)
Tolstoy's War and Peace
Hawthorne's American Notebooks
Shakespeare's Complete Works
Gogol's Dead Souls

The items by the Russian authors would be translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

The edition of the Folk Tales that I own has similar typography on the dust jacket, but the drawing selected was different.

 

[Extollager]

PS Those who wish may play by different rules, but I limited my selection of 200 to books that I already own, and so did not include books that I might buy if I knew I was going to have to move into a facility in which I could own just 200 books.

I forgot to say that my Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy is the set translated for Penguin by Tiina Nunnally. Here are what I believe are the current covers:

 

[Extollager]

Here are the Kristin Lavransdatter editions that I have:

 

[nixie]

That's cruel only 200.

First on list is...

Erikson's Malazan series( 10)

Feist's original Riftwar books (3)

King's Dark Tower (7)

I'm counting Zelany's Amber as one.(1) I've got the Great Book of Amber in one Volume.

Mists of Avalon (1)

Dennis Wheatly's Devil Rides Out and The Forbidden Territory (2)

Lord of Rings and The Hobbit (2)

I need to do some more thinking on rest.

 

[Extollager]

Nixie, I know that's tough -- only 200. But it could happen! Some of us probably will have to face a Great Shed-Off of books someday. Whether or not we do, it is interesting to do the thought experiment.

I hope you'll post more of your 200.

 

[Metryq]

I've already started the transition to ebooks. Most translate well, but my "must-have" shelf-hogging books are all art books of one sort or another: archives of all the master painters and sculptors; "making of" books on movies, animation, and special effects; volumes on anatomy and the art of animation; nature books with huge color plates; and a few odds and ends like hardcover reprints of the Collier's articles on space and illustrated by Bonestell.

 

[Extollager]

Metryg, I thought of that (eventually!) -- so I suspect that what we'll see in this thread will include postings from

[a] people like me who haven't gone to Kindle, etc. and really do like to own, read, mark, and sometimes hand around physical books

people who are e-book oriented but like large formats for some items, such as you mention

[c] people willing to go e-book, but who would keep some books for sentimental reasons

An example of the category for me would be Gislebertus, Sculptor of Autun -- I love this large-format book:

As an example of the [c] category situation: Alan Garner's The Weirdstoneof Brisingamen made my list of 200 eventually, in one of my batches of books, but I specified that I meant the worn small-format Ace paperback that I bought around 1969 at 13 or 14 years of age. That particular copy is a sentimental favorite of mine. I do still enjoy the story for its own sake, but apart from the sentimental connection I might not include it in my list of 200.

 

[Metryq]

Extollager, that Gislebertus cover set off a chain of thought. People travel to St. Lazare to experience the art in person. If the technology existed, the "SQuID recorders" from Strange Days or the Star Trek holodeck might substitute for an actual trip. Even then, capturing the sculpture in an artbook is an art also, and one that readers may enjoy more with each new viewing.

This thread started off assuming a "limited baggage" situation, like a nursing home. Suppose the nursing home had a technology that could endow instant and perfect recall of everything one had read, seen, experienced. Would that be better than re-reading the book, or is "art" something more—an experience that can be new even when it is old? Does the experience mature as we do?

Forgive me, I did not mean to highjack the thread into a new direction. I'll have to go scan a few covers now.

 

[Extollager]

Suppose the nursing home had a technology that could endow instant and perfect recall of everything one had read, seen, experienced. Would that be better than re-reading the book, or is "art" something more—an experience that can be new even when it is old? Does the experience mature as we do?

When I reread a book, i have an experience not only of the content of the book, but of reading again this copy of the book -- so every new visit of a book I have read is, for me, an experience of myself as a mortal being. It is also an experience of myself as someone who engaged with that book when I was not precisely the same person that I am now, since I'm a continuing consciousness that yet is always changing.

I think the rereading of e-books will not work quite this way. In a sense it will be a "purer" reading. When I reread David Copperfield as an ebook, even if I access the same text (let's say a Penguin Classic edition as accessed by a Kindle) and use the same reader, it won't be the same, won't have the same associations. One could say: "won't have these associations getting in the way of reading David Copperfield.

I wonder if this will bring about changes in reading and in writing about reading. Because I get the sense at places like Chrons that "reading" is very much about Me Reading This Copy That I Love sometimes...

 

[Metryq]

Okay, some of the books I'd have to take with me as physical books...

The above are examples of the big, "coffee table" books warping my shelves. I can get lost in books like Sculpting a Galaxy (on the Star Wars models) or The Winston Effect (on Stan Winston Studios, now Legacy Effects) for hours. These books have "presence" with their glossy, heavy paper and giant, high resolution photos. A book like Raymond Fielding's The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography, although now very outdated, would transfer very well to ebook format. None of the illustrative photos need to be especially large, although ebooks support video and other media better suited for instruction.

Above are just two of my old space books with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell. Aside from the large, colorful plates, I prize these books for their historical significance...they also comfort me when I get a bad case of "rocket fever." These books make me smile when I think of how real space missions and hardware turned out—but we've been out of space too long! One looks at the dreams in these books, and they are spectacular.

As much as I like ebooks, there's something special about fancy, leather-bound books, like this Astounding 60th Anniversary collection. (Okay, so I grabbed this photo off the Web, but my books look just like this.) My set once belonged to my father, so they also have sentimental value. I just have to make sure the ribbon bookmarkers are tucked into the shelf, or my perpetually playful cat will chew on them and tug the books off the shelf.

Once A Mouse... is a children's book first printed in 1961. My mom picked it up while in art school, and I "inherited" the book by never letting go of it after discovering it as a child. This Indian fable told in woodcut prints is still available and highly recommended. This particular copy has sentimental value, but I also love the large pages—even the grain of the wood blocks stands out. I still have a copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon, but that's a small format book that would convert to vector art very easily.

 

[Fried Egg]

That's cruel only 200.

It should be more than enough. Let's face it, if you're going into a nursing home, your days are probably numbered. You'll be lucky to read that many.

As for myself, I imagine when the time comes, I'll still have a large to-read list and so I'd probably take half my allowance as books I am yet to read. What they will be, I obviously can't say, but I wouldn't want to confine myself to merely books I had already read.

 

[Metryq]

You'll be lucky to read that many.

Carl Sagan did this scary thing in the Cosmos TV series where he illustrated the size of modern libraries by assuming you read a book a week and lived a normal lifespan. He said how many books that would be. Then while standing next to a wall of bookshelves, he said, "That would be from about here..." walking a few paces, "to about here."

 

[Connavar]

This is impossible for me at the moment because who knows which 200 books are most important and which ones became future favs when im close to nursing home age.

Some books i read 5 years ago are not as impressive as they were then who knows which books i will get over in several decades. A constant reader taste, likes, dislikes changes all the time.

Or is this sort what if i had to choose 200 books right now like i was going to a nursing home ?

 

[GOLLUM]

This is an interesting thread for me.

No clear idea what I would include except to say there would have to be something from Borges, Cortazar, Neruda, Joyce, Calvino, Eco, Hesse, Sebald, Flannery O'Connor (I'm a convert), Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, William Morris, E.R. Eddison. Lord Dunsany, Steven Erickson, Angela Carter, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E Howard, HP Lovecraft, Ligotti, Poe, Horacio Quiroga, Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville, Neil Gaiman, Allan Moore, M.R. James, Edowaga Rampa, Kawabata, Yukio Mushima, Kobe Abe, Haruki Murakami, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Arno Schmidt, Thomas Bernhard, Gunter Grass, Diderot, Heinrich Boll, Herman Broch, Joseph Roth, Willa Cather, Sigrid Undset (my copy of aforementioned trilogy is old and battered and trans by Archer & Scott), Proust, Musil. Hrabal, Yeshar Kemal, Ismail Kadare, Orhan Pamuk, Tolstoy, Dumas, Gene Wolfe, Avram Davidson, M John Harrison, Christopher Priest, Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang, Patricia McKillip, Jack Vance, George MacDonlad, Saramago, A.S. Byatt, Miguel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Alejio Carpentier, Naghuib Mahfouz, R.K Narayan, Tagore, Alfred Doblin, Joseph Roth, Lu Xun, Orwell, Woolf. Shakespeare, Burroughs, Walter De La Mare, Robert Walser, Friedrich Durrenmatt, John Powys, Wyndham Lewis, Pushkin, Gogol, Flann O'Brien, Isaac Babel, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, Twain, Nabokov, Beckett, Roberto Bolano, Joao Rosa, Jorge Armado, Carlos Ruis Zafon, Vargas Llosa, Ben Johnson, Will Self, Ivan Klima, Goethe, Dante, Stefan Zweig, Yuri Olesha, Andrey Platonov, Czelaw Milosz, Dostoevsky, Adolfo Bio Casares, J. K. Huysmans, Kafka, Theophile Gautier, Bruno Schulz, Fernando Pessoa, Flaubert, Cesare Pavese, Tolkien, Comte de Lautrome, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Luigi Pirandello, Rabelais, Chinua Achebe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Le Guin, Akutagawa, Saki, Ray Bradbury, Edith Wharton, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Fust, G Cabrera Infante, Blaise Cendares, Gerard De Nerval....and frankly the list goes on so I'll stop here a quick count at about 180 and that off the top of my head Lol!....

 

[natalienoo]

I can sympathize with this idea of limiting your book collection. I recently moved to Barbados and left all my beautiful books in the capable hands of family. I brought only these 3 books with me --> The Lungfish, the Dodo and the Unicorn (Willy Ley), The Pilo Family Circus (Will Elliott) and Marine Ecology (Michel Kaiser)

Along with a Canon camera guide and a kindle. I adore books, but heard they are expensive and very limited over here, hence the switch to e-books. So does that mean a single kindle with 3,500 electronic files counts as one?

Nursing home-wise I would have to reconsider. Chances are my eyesight would be abysmal so larger fonts may be in order. It's a tricky consideration.

 

[Daisy-Boo]

This is a really interesting mental exercise. Even though I have a Kindle, my paper books are still very precious to me. So here is my first batch:

(1-25) Discworld collection
(26-31) James Herriot collection
(32-35) Gerald Durrell collection
(36-49) Dresden Files series
(50-56) Isaac Asimov collection
(57-58) Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow and Children of God
(59-68) Stephen King collection
(69-79) Graphic novel collection
(80-84) A Song of Ice and Fire series

 

[Connavar]

I know there is no series collections for me, i have too wide taste. I would have to limit 1-2 books by a single author not bore my old self and not have to never read again too many fav authors

It would to have start with books by Homer, Euripides!

 

[Extollager]

Or is this sort what if i had to choose 200 books right now like i was going to a nursing home ?

That is how I imagined it.

I suggest that you don't focus on the "nursing home" aspect too much, folks. The point is to identify 200 books that you own and that you would keep if you had to reduce your library now. I mention the "nursing home" because some of us probably will have to move into something of the sort some day. But if you prefer, you can imagine the exercise like this:

Suppose your residence was burning down and you could carry out exactly 200 books. On this occasion a huge heavy book and a wee paperback weigh the same, thanks to a passing comet warping spacetime, so you can select your 200 without regard for size or weight. Moreover the flames will give you all the time you need to carry out exactly 200, but once you have done that, everything burns. What would you carry?

Or the fascist government's black helicopters are heading your way and you have to flee in your car to your hideaway in Idaho or the Yorkshire moors or the Australian outback or the Canadian Rockies. You have room for 200 books of any size. What will you take?

Or you can use any other scenario that gets you to the same place!

 

[Extollager]

This is an interesting thread for me.

No clear idea what I would include except to say there would have to be something from ...... Flannery O'Connor (I'm a convert)

You put this huge fat smile on my face!

 

[Extollager]

Gollum would include "Sigrid Undset (my copy of aforementioned trilogy is old and battered and trans by Archer & Scott)"...

If you can find it on the Web, Mitzi Brunsdale has an interesting review comparing the two translations. It was written for Crisis Magazine around the time the Nunnally translations appeared. Basically she likes them both, but I think would recommend the Nunnally translation as more complete and easier to read.

Sigrid Undset