Rearranging

So I spent part of yesterday doing what I call the "big purge": essentially, attempting to clear out the clutter in my apartment. I'm actually not much of an accumulator - when I moved almost two years to this place, I was fairly merciless in chucking stuff out while packing. In an ideal world, I'd pare my life down to about six or seven boxes. I like the concept of minimalism, of only having the bare essentials on hand. (I'm also partly inspired by the performance artist's Marina Abramovic's living spaces, gloriously photographed recently by the NYTimes.) Yet, it ain't easy! I look around my home office and I still see stray pieces of paper, books, ticket stubs, business cards, vinyl LPs - what the heck is all this stuff doing in here?

I began the purge with my bookshelf. I'm a reader, but I'm not a collector of books. I once was, and had two full-to-bursting bookshelves to offer up as proof. But when I moved out of the living space I shared with my then-partner M., she said she wanted to keep the books that she had accumulated from her participation in a monthly book club, many of which I had bought and also read. She had an emotional attachment to the books, so I left a whack of them with her. My new apartment wasn't so accommodating with space, so that's when I first started to get rid of books. My philosophy was fairly simple: I would truck the books that I had still yet to read with me, as well as books that personally meant something. Still, even a few years later, the messiness of my one bookshelf was a constant annoyance. So I engaged in yet-another book sort and purge yesterday.

Basically, I'm holding on to a handful of books from authors who mean something to me: Philip Roth, Roberto Bolano, Haruki Murakami, Iris Murdoch, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Mavis Gallant, Milan Kundera, Margaret Laurence (well, just one Laurence: The Diviners, a book I've bought several times for a number of different friends; even today I still have two copies), along with a few "one offs" like Anna Karenina and James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime (perhaps the sexiest book ever written). These are the authors and books that have inspired me and, dare I say (for fear of hyperbole), changed me. I'm also holding on some non-fiction, primarily journalism that originally inspired me many years ago to be a magazine writer: a couple of Gay Talese books, Ian Brown's fantastic Man Overboard, two Joan Didion collections, among a few others. I also have some books of poetry and books about writers and writing on a shelf above my desk, as well as some music books (biographies of jazz musicians primarily) in the office, but I'm not "counting" those right now since I'm toying with the idea of purging those as well. (But not yet - I'll admit to struggles with nostalgia...)

Interestingly, I still have one entire shelf of my main bookshelf to deal with: it's the reading queue. These are books I've accumulated over the last few years, largely from secondhand sales, that I've been meaning to read. (Some, like a couple of the mysteries, are earmarked for a camping trip I'm sure to do at some point this summer.) I'm hoping to get through them eventually, but even those might have to be dealt with in a purge moment if I don't get to them in the next year or. This is how that shelf looks:

But let's be serious: am I really going to be reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest?