If you live with other people, do you or have you comingled your books?
I have with roommates before, although I don't now because we don't have a communal bookshelf. (Since both of my roommates are grad students, I think it would be pretty easy to separate most of theirs from most of mine, and I trust them on the rest.) Throughout most of college my roommate and I were each issued our own bookshelf, but one year we shared a sweet built-in bookshelf; it was still inadequate, but it looked stylish.
I like to think if I were married or cohabitating I would gladly oversee the merging of the libraries, but I haven't been either so I don't know. Anne Fadiman has a funny essay in her collection EX LIBRIS: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER about what happened when she and her husband combined their collections, a task they put off until they had been married for five years and had a child. That seems absurd to me, but maybe she was just really busy, or moving around a lot.
5 days ago
2 comments:
Most of my books are still in Wisconsin, though maybe that means they aren't mine anymore. And since I've moved out here, I just haven't bought that many books. In fact, just about the only time I buy books is when I take pity on a bookstore: hence my copy of THE 9/11 REPORT: A GRAPHIC ADAPTATION from The Baltimore Chop (for naught: they're out of business), STARDUST from Alliance Comics, and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES from McLean & Eakin Booksellers.
Morgan, meanwhile, has just about all of his books with him, a result of having his parents move and sending him all of his stuff (we have all of his Legos and video games, too).
So odds are, if you pick up a book in our house, it's his.
My books are probably found in clusters (chemistry and biochemistry textbooks, for example, are at the bottom of bookshelves to keep them from tipping over).
We have A LOT of bookshelf space in our house. My husband isn't much of a novel reader. He reads mostly non-fiction and work related topics (he writes computer software). As my only goal with a computer is that it do exactly what I want it to do when I command it, he and I don't have much in common when it comes to reading. Thus, even after twelve years of marriage, our books are mostly separate.
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