the quest

A few days after Christmas last year I took inventory. Under the tree sat two stacks of books, peeking out from the sagging branches. I always ask for books and this year, like many past years, I had received several. While I contemplated what I wanted to read first I couldn’t escape the fact that similarly large stack remained ominously perched like steps to an invisible mountain castle, upon my bedside table. Included were three books I hadn’t finished: This is Your Brain on Music, Tree of Smoke and The Armies of the Night, which I had read twice before and was revisiting after the death of Norman Mailer.

I stood up and ventured over to our fiction bookshelf. In New York, it had dominated an entire wall of my girlfriend’s (now wife’s) apartment but here in Santa Monica, it barely took up half of one. Still, it’s big sucker, an inside-out construction built by my father-in-law with a spiny exoskeleton of ten 2X4s supporting 7 shelves. We had weighed the idea, in light of a possible earthquake, whether to anchor it to the wall. But the sheer weight of approximately 450 books (80 on the top shelf) has kept it sturdy.

At first glance, I could pick out at least dozen books I had received for Christmas and never read. There were the ones I had begun reading, liked and never finished (Cloudsplitter, Middlesex), monsters I had inexplicably asked for and received (The Unconsoled, Cryptomicon), and the random, unsolicited gift (John Grisham’s Bleachers, Magical Thinking by Augustin Burroughs, “Thanks, Sis”). I stood on a chair and started writing down the titles. Twenty books, mostly fiction.

Then I scanned the smaller bookshelf across the room that held some non-fiction plus a gaggle of Civil War books my wife had unloaded two years ago. I say unloaded because all eleven books, including Shelby Foote’s trilogy, arrived in a one, large, wrapped box. I am related to Ulysses S. Grant on my mother’s side and my wife, a history teacher felt I needed some reference. I added them to my list. Including the stacks under the tree, the two bookshelves I came up with 36. Eventually, I would add a few more buried in my office down the hall. 39. And so I decided, that over the next year, I would make it my project to try and read them all.