Book Blog)
How do you maintain a library when you've got no room for your books? No, this isn't the start of a JL Carr novel; it's a genuine conundrum faced by bookish 20 and 30somethings across the UK. With relentlessly rising rents, and record numbers of young people having to move back in with their parents, it's become clear that we are a nomadic generation.
As a student in Leeds I moved house three times in four years; in London it was seven times in three years. My experience was driven by the problems facing everyone renting in the capital; dodgy landlords, relocation for work, rent hikes, unemployment, a triple infestation of cockroaches, mice and pigeons. We've all been there. Regularly having to load your possessions into laundry bags and crisp boxes takes a toll on your finances and energy, but the effect on our book collection is rarely considered.
Maintaining a collection of beloved books in a damp flat with no shelves, which you'll probably have to move out of in six months' time, is a challenge. Prioritising which books to keep and which to jettison becomes increasingly difficult. Do you hold on to the books you know you'll reread or do you keep the to-be-read pile intact? I have a copy of A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter which, invariably, is forced on some unsuspecting friend right before every house move and then reclaimed the next day. A few of them have attempted to speed-read this fairly dense feminist literary history in the 48 hours I usually let it out of my sight but most have now learnt not to take it out of the bag.
Donating books to a charity shop or local school may be virtuous, but when you haven't had time to read them since your last move it becomes depressing. I dutifully moved a copy of Infinite Jest through six different postcodes, without reading it, until a recent move to Amsterdam meant choosing between 1,079 pages of David Foster Wallace and my hairdryer. Some books we can't give up for the oddest of reasons; there's a copy of Much Ado About Nothing I've been moving around for nearly a decade because Beatrice's speech to Benedict about eating Claudio's heart in the marketplace is the only piece of Shakespeare I have ever managed to memorise.
"Just buy a Kindle!" you might argue – but for many people, books are more than just books. They offer us an emotional connection to the past, to the person who gave it to us. They are a way to brighten up a dingy flat, they are a link to home, they are the hardest thing to move and the most enjoyable thing to unpack.
A recent essay by author Thomas E Kennedy in The New Yorker's Paragraphs Lost column focused on an elderly bibliophile wandering around his house looking for a book. It's beautifully written but, for someone living in rented accommodation, it's the size of his house rather than the style of his prose that makes an impression. He has multiple rooms, multiple bookcases; the man has so many books, he can lose books within his books!
So what do you do if you're moving into your childhood bedroom (which, if you're lucky, hasn't already been colonised by a younger sibling)? What if you're already facing your second move this year and can't bear the thought of pensioning off more of your beloved books? You start reading more. Read every book in your current bedroom and work out if they're worth the trip, give away as many books as you can, leave books with trusted friends to be reclaimed at a later point. Start looking at your books creatively; that stack of unread Daphne du Maurier novels can be a wobbly beside table. That copy of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman becomes a draft excluder.
The idea of worrying about your book collection when you're facing homelessness does, at first, seem slightly ludicrous. Anyone faced with logging onto Spareroom every lunchtime and trailing around dark streets with greasy estate agents every night would immediately swap their entire library for a guaranteed place to stay. But when you are trapped in the rental market, feeling at home in your overpriced, underheated room is important. Until councils start building more houses than they sell off, the majority of young people are going to be renting for a long time. While MPs score points off each other in the housing debate and then go home to their mansions, don't we all deserve one Billy bookcase full of favourite reads and yet to be discovered treasures?
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