While my modest library has some intentional purchases, it is largely books I want to own and have found at church sales, garage sales and thrift stores. Victoria is a wonderful book town and glorious books turn up all the time. Collecting books like that means I am never entirely sure what I own and that is delightful.
Even a modest library requires a certain amount of care. Too often I have run into a run of wonderful books which have sat, neglected, for fifty years, gathering a layer of dust which has turned to a sort of unpleasant grime. It is not hard to avoid this. Every few months you take every book off its shelf and gently blow the dust off. You rifle the pages to ensure there are no bugs and you make sure the dustjacket, if any, is on straight. Many of my books live in Ikea Kallax 2x4s and I proceed one cube at a time. I am nearly done the first of two Kallaxes. Get those done, and I’ll start on the upper shelves.
As I dusted, I ran across my signed edition of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. A favourite novel which is on my long list for re-reading. I met and interviewed Seth for my literary magazine, Two Chairs. He was tiny and exhausted and, in the manner of such interviews, was keen to talk about the book he was touring, An Equal Music, but he saw I was carrying A Suitable Boy and was kind enough to sign it.
A Suitable Boy was published in 1993 and the India it depicts is recognizably the India of Paul Scott. The great surge of Indian industrialization and tech can be glimpsed, but the hangover from the Raj remains. It is interesting to think that A Suitable Boy was published thirty years ago and in those thirty years the sub-continent has been radically transformed. And it may explain why the long-awaited A Suitable Girl, anticipated in 2016, has yet to be published.
In the cubby, just under Seth, are my Jonathan Raban, Coasting, Arabia, and his masterpiece, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. Raban, who died early this year at 80, moved to the US in the 1980s, finally fetching up in Seattle. Home port for his leisurely, pensive, passage through the Salish Sea. I first read the book as I began to live more directly near that stretch of ocean, up from Puget Sound, into Sidney and on through the Gulf Islands. I have the sudden fogs out my window as I write this.
Passage is a book I recommend to anyone who wants to get the flavour of the North West Coast. Raban is a rather timid sailor, but he is also a very accomplished travel writer and he gets the often melancholy sense of place the endless firs and cold, clear, water create. His description of a rather lonely man bundled up against the damp cold of the Pacific Fall, reading by lantern light in his bunk in his own, moored boat on the never-silent, never-still, sea is a bit pathetic but very moving.
More cubbies await.
Reading "by lantern light in his bunk in his own, moored boat on the never-silent, never-still, sea" sounds idyllic. The further away, the better, I say.