…I was going to call this “Kindling” but demurred to avoid a potential Amazon connotation
It’s somewhat easy, when you have a nine foot long couch, to bookend it of a Saturday night with your boyfriend, a cocktail or two, and a certain smugness. This is where I found myself a few weekends ago, and, eyes scanning the wall of books framing the end of the couch (and said boyfriend), I began to comment on our duplicates. You see, it was just last January that jmags left New York for Portland, bringing his books along with him.
Our initial system of organization (alphabetized by genre) was relatively functional — perhaps especially so when compared to my last grouping strategy, which was by color, and made for some very compelling juxtaposition, but was not so much useful for finding anything — until we rescued his remaining books from what he refers to as the Ancestral Homeland. But that is for another post.
As it is, our duplicates speak well of our reading habits — double Nietzsche, triple Virgil (two Mandelbaums, one Fitzgerald), etc., with one glaring exception. That would be Nella Larsen’s Passing. Yes, this book has virtues. But I greatly dislike it for the melodrama and missing logic of the ending, its general evasiveness, and for being introduced to it in an academic setting as a part of a sequence of books that were dramatically superior. This is no fault of the book’s, but true nonetheless. It happens with people, too.
jmags didn’t remember much of anything about it at all, much less why he’d held onto it so long. And yet here it was, Penguin edition, doubled, on our shelf. Full of scorn, I decided something should be done about this misallocation of precious space — immediately.
Note: I realize this behavior might be construed as undercutting my claims about melodrama.